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<Paper uid="P84-1111">
  <Title>HANDLING SYNTACTICAL AMBIGUITY IN MACHINE TRANSLATION</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="521" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2. PHILOSOPHY
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This approach may be viewed as an attempt to simulate the behavior of s man-translator who is linguistically very competent, but is quite unfamiliar with the domain he is translating his texts from. Such a man-translator will be able to say what words in the original and in the translated sentence go together under all of the syntactically admissible analyses; however, he will be, in general, unable to make a decision as to which of these parses &amp;quot;make sense&amp;quot;. Our approach will be an obvious way out of this situation. And it is in fact not Infrequently employed in the everyday practice of more &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; translators.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> We believe that the capacity of such translators to produce quite intelligible translations is a fact that can have a very direct bearing on at least some trends in MT. Resolvlng syntactical ambiguity, or, to put it more accurately, evading syntactical ambiguity in MT following a similar human-like strategy is only one instance of this.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> There are two further points that should be made in connection with the approach discussed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> We assume as more or less self-evident that: (i) MT should not be intended to explicate texts in the SL by means of texts in the TL as previous approaches imply, but should only translate them, no matter how ambiguous they might happen to be; (ii) Since ambiguities almost always pass unnoticed in speech, the user will unconsciously dtsambtguate them (as in fact he would have done, had he read the text in the SL); this, in effect, will not diminish the quality of the translation in comparison with the original, at least insofar as ambiguity is concerned.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="521" end_page="521" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
3. THE DESCRIPTION OF SYNTACTICAL AMBIGUITY
IN ENGLISH AND BULGARIAN
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The empirical basis of the approach is provided by an extensive study of syntactical ambiguity in English and Bulgarlan (Pericliev 19835, accomplished within the framework of a version of dependency grammar using dependency arcs and bracketlngs. In this study, from a given llst of configurations for each language, all logically-admlssible ambiguous strings of three types in Engllsh and Bulgarian were calculated. The first type of syntactlcally ambiguous strings is of the form:</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> where A, B, ... are complexes of word-classes, &amp;quot;---~&amp;quot; is a dependency arc, and 1, 2, ... are syntactical relations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The second type is of the form:  It was found, first, that almost all logically -admissible strings of the three types are actually realized in both languages (cf. the same result also for Russian in JordanskaJa (1967)5. Secondly, and more important, there turned out to be a striking coincidence between the strings in English and Bulgarian; the latter was to he expected from the coincidence of configurations in both languages as well as from their sufficiently similar global syntactic organization.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="6" start_page="521" end_page="523" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
4. TRANSLATIONAL PROBLEMS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> With a view to the aims of translation, it was convenient to distinguish two cases: Case A, in which to each syntactically ambiguous string in English corresponds a syntactically ambiguous string in Bulgarlan, and Case B, in which to some English strings do not correspond any Bulgarian ones; Case A provides a possibility for literal English into Bulgarian translation, while there is no such possibillty for sentences containing strings classed under Case B.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> 4.1. Case A: Literal Translation English strings which can be literally translated into Bulgarian comprise,roughly speaking, the majority and the most common of strings to appear In real English texts. Informally, these strings can be included into several large groups of syntactically ambiguous constructions, such as constructions with &amp;quot;floating&amp;quot; word-classes (Adverbs, Prepositional Phrases, etc. acting as slaves either to one, or to another master-word), constructions with prepositional and post-positional adjuncts to conjoined groups, constructions with several conjoined members, constructions with symmetrical predicates, some elliptical constructions, etc.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Due to space limitations, a few English phrases with their literal translations will suffice as an illustration of Case A. (Further on, syntactical relations as labels of arcs will be omitted where superfluous in marking the ambiguity):</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> beau ful( d )(wo n(N) II gi s(N) &gt; v' !1 'v ) (ze,,, (N) &amp;quot; momicheta(N) ) ----&gt;kra ivi( dj, It 4.2. Case B: Non-Literal Translation English strings which cannot be literally translated into Bulgarian are such strings which contain: (i) word-classes (V i f Gerund) not pre- n ' sent in Bulgarian, and/or (ii) syntactical relations (e.g. &amp;quot;composite&amp;quot;: language~-~ -- theory, etc.) not present in Bulgarian, and/or (iii) other differences (in global syntactical organization, agreement, etc. ).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> It will be shown how certain English strings falling under this heading are related to Bulgarian strings preserving their ambiguity. A way to overcome difficulties with (il) and (iii) is exemplified on a very common (complex) string, vlz.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Adj/N/Prt+N/N's+N (e.g. stylish ~entlemen's suits).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> As an illustration, here we confine to problems to be met with (i), and, more concretely, to such English strings containing Vin f. These strings are mapped onto Bulgarian strings containing da-construction or a verbal noun (V i ~ generally b-eeing translated either way). E.g. nXthe Vln f in obj. dlr (8) a. He promised(V) to please(Vin f) mother t._JI . eL. adv. mod (promised what or why?) is rendered by a da-construction in agreement with the subject, preserving the ambiguity: obj. dir ~,'&amp;quot; I\[ ~1 ' zaradva(da-const r) objelht a (V) da b. T~J</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> can be rendered alternatively by a d_~a-construc ~nztion or by a prepositional verbal noun:</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> obj. dl r J Yet in other strings, e.g. The chicken(N) is ready(Adj) to eat(V. .) (the chicken eats or is eaten.), in order to preserve the ambiguity the infinitive should be rendered by a prepositional verbal noun: Pileto(N) e gotovo(AdJ) z_~a jadene (PrVblN), rather than with the finite da-construction, since in the latter case we would obtain two unambiguous translations: Pileto e gotovo d a ~ade (the chicken eats) or Pileto e got ovo da se ~ade (the chicken is eaten), and so on.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> For some English strings no syntactically ambiguous Bulgarian strings could be put into correspondence, so that a translation with our method proved to be an impossibility. E.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14"> (either the mechanic or someone else is the helper) is such a sentence due to the impossibility in Bulgarian~r two non-prepositional objects, a direct and an indirect one, to appear in a sentence.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="521" end_page="521" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
4.3. Mul~,,iple Syntactical Ambiguity
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Many very frequently encountered cases of multiple syntactical ambiguity can also be handled successfully within this approach. E.g. a phrase like Cybernetical devices and systems for automatic control and dia~nosis in biomedicine with more than 30 possible parsings is amenable to literal translation into Bulgarian.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="521" end_page="523" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
4.4. Semantically Irrelevant Syntactical
Ambi~uity
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Disambiguating syntactical ambiguity is an important task in MT only because different meanings are usually associated with the different syntactical descriptions. This, however, is not always the case. There are some constructions in English the syntactical ambiguity of which cannot lead to multiple understanding. E.g. in sentences of the form A is not B (He is not happy), in which the adverbial particle not is either a verbal negation (He isn't happy) or a non-verbal negation (He's not happy), the different syntactical trees will be interpreted semantically as synonymous: 'A is not B' ~-==~A is not-B'.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1">  We should not worry about finding Bulgarlan syntactically ambiguous correspondences for such English constructions. We can choose arbitrarily one analysis, since either of the syntactical descriptions will provide correct information for our translational purposes. Indeed, the construction above has no ambiguous Bulgarian correspondence: in Bulgarian the negating particle combines either with the verb (then it is written as a separate word) or with the adjective (in which case it is prefixed to it). Either construction, however, will yield a correct translation: To~ nee == -radosten or To~ e neradosten.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="3" start_page="523" end_page="523" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
4.5. A Lexical Problem
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Certain difficulties may arise, having managed to map English syntactically ambiguous strings onto ambiguous Bulgarian ones. These difficulties are due to the different behavior of certain English lexemes in comparison to their Bulgarian equivalents. This behavior is displayed in the phenomenon we call &amp;quot;intralingual lexical-resolution of syntactical ambiguity&amp;quot; (the substitution of lexemes in the SL with their translational equivalents from the TL results in the resolution of the syntactical ambiguity).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> For instance, in spite of the existence of ambiguous strings in both languages of the form Verbtr/itr~-&gt;Noun, with some particular lexemes (e.g. shoot~r/itr==-~&gt;zastrel~amtr or strel~amitr), In which to One Engllsh lexeme correspond two in Bulgarian (one only transitive, and the other only intransitive), the ambiguity in the translation will be lost. This situation explains why it seems impossible to translate ambiguously into Bulgarian examples containing verbs of the type given, or verbal nouns formed from such verbs, as the case is in The shootin~ of the hunters.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> This problem, however, could be generally tackled in the translation into Bulgarian, since it is a language usually providing a series of forms for a verb: transitive, intransitive, and transitive/intransitive, which are more or less synonymous ~for more details, cf. Penchev and Perlcliev (1984)).</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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