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<Paper uid="C94-2202">
  <Title>LEXICAL FUNCTIONS AND MACHINE TRANSLATION</Title>
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LEXICAL FUNCTIONS AND MACHINE TRANSLATION
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    <Paragraph position="0"> Dirk Heylen, Kerry G. Maxwell and Marc Verhagen OTS, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, Netherlands CLMT Group, Essex University, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ, England email: heylen@let.ruu.nl, kerry@essex.ac.uk, verhm@essex.ac.uk This paper discusses the lexicographical concept of lexical functions (Mel'~uk and Zolkovsky, 1984) and their potential exploitation in the development of a machine translation lexicon designed to handle collocations. We show how lexical functions can be thought to reflect cross-linguistic meaning concepts for collocational structures and their translational equivalents, and therefore suggest themselves as some kind of language-independent semantic primitives from which translation strategies can be developed. ~ 1 Description of the Problem Collocations present specific problems in translation, both in human and automatic contexts. If we take the construction heavy smoker in English and attempt to translate it into French and German, we find that a literal translation of heavy yields the wrong result, since the concept expressed by the adjective (something like ' excess:i_ve ' ) is translated by grand (large) in French and stark (strong) in German. We observe then that in some sense the adjectives stark, grand and heavy are equivalent in the collocational context, but that this is of course not typically the case in otber contexts, ef grande boite, starke Schachtel and heavy box, where the adjectives could hardly be viewed as equiwdent. It seems then that adjectives which are not literal translations of one another may share meaning properties specifically in the collocational context.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> How then can we specify this special equivalence in the machine translation dictionary? The answer seems to lie in addressing the concept which underlies the union of adjective and noun in these three cases, i.e., intensification, and hence establish a single meaning representation tbr the adjectives which can be viewed as an interlingual pivot for translation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Collocations have been studied by computational linguists in different contexts. For instance, there is a substantial body of papers on the extraction of &amp;quot;frequently co-occurring words&amp;quot; from corpora using statistical methods (e.g., (Choueka et al., 1983), (Church and Hanks, 1989), (Smadja, 1993) to list only a few).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> These authors focus on techniques for providing material that can be used in other processing tasks such as x The research rcpmlcd in this paper was undmtaken as the project &amp;quot;Collocations and the Lexicalisation of Semantic Operations&amp;quot; (ET10/75). Financial contributions weir by the Commission of the  word sense disambiguation, information retrieval, natural language generation and so on. Also, the use of collocations in different applications has been discussed by various authors ((McRoy, 1992), (Pnstejovsky et al., 1992), (Smadja and McKeown, 1990) etc.). However, collocations are not only considered usefnl, but also a problem both in certain applications (e.g. generation, (Nirenburg et al., 1988), machine translation, (Heid and Raab, 1989)) and fiom a more theoretical point of view (e.g. (Abeill6 and Schabes, 1989), (Krenn and Erbach, to appear)).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> We have been concerned with investigating the lexical .\['unctions (IJTs) of Mel'0,uk (Mel'6uk and Zolkovsky, 1984) as a candidate interllngual device for tbe translation of adjectival and verbal collocates. Our work is related to research by (Heid and Raab, /989).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> In some respects it is an extension of some of their suggestions. Our work differs fi'om theirs in scope and also in the exploration of wtrious other directions.</Paragraph>
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