Pierrette Bouillon

Compound Nouns in a Unification-Based MT System

This paper describes an approach to the treatment of nominal compounds in a machine translation project employing a modern unification-based system.General problems connected with the analysis of compounds are briefly reviewed, and the project, for the automatic translation of Swiss avalanche bulletins, is introduced. Avalanche bulletins deal with a limited semantic domain and employ a sublanguage in which nominal compounds occur frequently. These and other properties of the texts affect the treatment of compounds, permitting certain simplifications, while leaving a number of possible alternative analyses.We discuss the different problems involving the translation of compounds between German and French, and show how the computational environment in use permits two different approaches to the problem: an interlingua-based approach and a transfer-based approach. Finally, we evaluate these approaches with respect to linguistic and computational considerations applicable in a MT-system dealing with a limited semantic domain and describe the solution that has actually been implemented.