Parameterizing lexical conceptual structure for interlingual machine translation

Conclusion

this is an interesting and informative book with much to recommend it. It covers a great deal of ground in discussion of ideas and presentation of an actual implementation, but I believe the major contribution to be in four areas:

- In presenting a system whose syntax is based on “principles and parameters”, Dorr provides an interesting challenge to the standard rule-based approaches which are broadly unification-based.

- Dorr presents an interlingua which appears to have relatively solid linguistic motivation, and for which there is a very systematic mapping to and from text. This directly addresses two of the standard objections to interlingual approaches: arbitrariness and lack of systematicity. Unfortunately, the range of phenomena she considers is too limited to address the other major objection that is normally raised in relation to interlingual approaches: that of lack of coverage.

- Dorr presents a classification of translation divergences. I believe such a classification to be worthwhile, and I take this is a useful beginning. However, I find the actual classification proposed too broad, and theory-dependent. Moreover Dorr's claims about completeness of the classification are not convincing.

- Dorr presents a solution to various translation divergences via parameterization of the interlingual representation. Here I believe reservations about conceptual coherence of the representation and the generality of the approach are appropriate.