posted on 1973-02-01, 00:00authored byMasaru Tomita, Jaime G. Carbonell
Building on the well-established premise that reliable machine
translation requires a significant degree of. text comprehension,
this paper presents a recent advance in multi-lingual knowledge-based
machine translation (KBMT). Unlike previous approaches,
the current method provides for separate syntactic and semantic
knowledge sources that are integrated dynamically for parsing
and generation. Such a separation enables the system to have
syntactic grammars, language specific but domain general, and
semantic knowledge bases, domain specific but language general.
Subsequently, grammars and domain knowledge are precompiled
automatically in any desired combination to produce very efficient
and very thorough real-time parsers. A pilot implementation of our
KBMT architecture using functional grammars and entity-oriented
semantics demonstrates the feasibility of the new approach