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Syntactic and Semantic Impact of Prepositions in Machine Translation : An Empirical Study of French-English Translation of Prepositions ‘à’, ‘de’ and ‘en’

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Human Language Technology. Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics (LTC 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12598))

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Abstract

This paper presents a study about ambiguous French prepositions, stressing out their roles as dependencies introducers, in order to derive some translation heuristics into English, based on a French-English set of parallel texts. These heuristics are formulated out of statistical observations and use some up-to-date results in Machine Translation (MT). Their originality mostly relies upon two items: (1) The importance given to syntax and dependency relations, along with lexicons, the latter being well browsed by the present literature in the domain (2) The existence of intrinsic semantics in prepositions, something rather discarded in NLP literature devoted to statistical MT, that tends to point at the most appropriate translation. An experiment has been run on corpora in both languages, using a dependency parser in the source language, and results looked to be encouraging for a “step by step approach” for MT improvement.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    URL: http://www.e-anglais.com/ressources/glossary.html, developed by Kevin Halion. Mostly human readable, but machine operability was easy.

  2. 2.

    The parser developer has created a semi-automatic counting tool which allows him to check the parser abilities in terms of recall and precision.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Montpellier and LIRMM-CNRS, Montpellier, France

    Violaine Prince

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  1. Violaine Prince
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Correspondence to Violaine Prince .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

    Zygmunt Vetulani

  2. Laboratoire d’Informatique pour la Méca, Orsay, France

    Patrick Paroubek

  3. Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

    Marek Kubis

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Prince, V. (2020). Syntactic and Semantic Impact of Prepositions in Machine Translation : An Empirical Study of French-English Translation of Prepositions ‘à’, ‘de’ and ‘en’. In: Vetulani, Z., Paroubek, P., Kubis, M. (eds) Human Language Technology. Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics. LTC 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12598. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66527-2_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66527-2_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-66526-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-66527-2

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