Igor M. Boguslavsky

Dependency treebank for Russian: concept, tools, types of information

The paper describes a tagging scheme designed for the Russian Treebank, and presents tools used for corpus creation.

Creating a Universal Networking Language module within an advanced NLP system

A multifunctional NLP environment, ETAP-3, is presented. The environment has several NLP applications, including a machine translation system, a natural language interface to SQL type databases, synonymous paraphrasing of sentences, syntactic error correction module, and a computer-assisted language learning tool. Emphasis is laid on a new module of the processor responsible for the interface with the Universal Networking Language, a recent product by the UN University intended for the facilitation of multilanguage, multiethnic access to communication networks such as WWW. The UNL module of ETAP-3 naturally combines the two major approaches accepted in machine translation: the transfer-based approach and the interlingua approach.

Interactive resolution of intrinsic and translational ambiguity in a machine translation system

The paper presents the module of interactive word sense disambiguation and syntactic ambiguity resolution used within a machine translation system, ETAP-3. The method applied consists in asking the user to identify a word sense, or a syntactic interpretation, whenever the system lacks reliable data to make the choice automatically. In lexical disambiguation, part of man-machine dialogue refers to the analysis phase, while the other part is activated during transfer. For this purpose, entries of the working dictionaries of the system are supplemented with clear diagnostic comments and illustrations that enable the user to choose the most appropriate option and in this way channel the course of system operation.