posted on 2008-02-01, 00:00authored byMasaru Tomita, Jaime G. Carbonell
Machine translation should be semanticalty-accurate, linguisticallyprincipled,
user-interactive, and extensible to multiple languages and
domains. This paper presents the universal parser architecture that
strives to meet these objectives. In essence, linguistic knowledge
bases (syntactic, semantic, lexical, pragmatic), encoded in
theoretically-motivated formalisms such as lexical-functional
grammars, are unified and precompiled into fast run-time grammars
for parsing and generation. Thus, the universal parser provides
principled run-time integration of syntax and semantics, while
preserving the generality of domain-independent syntactic grammars,
and language-independent domain knowledge bases; the optimized
cross product is generated automatically in the precornpllation phase.
Initial results for bi-directional English-Japanese translation show
considerable promise both in terms of demonstrating the theoretical
feasibillty of the approach and in terms of subsequent practical utility.