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<Paper uid="C88-2160">
  <Title>Interactive Translation : a new approach</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="785" end_page="787" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
B. THE PROPOSAL
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The linguistic framework The linguistic treatment of ambiguities is based on the struture of a linguistic descriptor (labeled and attributed tree) defined in SCSL \[Zajac 86a\]. Let us recall briefly the multilevel linguistic theory of</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Strategy for interactive disambiguisation The approach we propose is not to produce explanations using linguistic concepts of the linguistic model (as it has been done up to now, see \[Melby &amp; alii 80, Tomita 84\]), but to produce paraphrases that make explicit the ambiguous relations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Lexical ambiguities are quite trivial to solve by presenting the definitions from a dictionary. In this paper, they are supposed to be already solved. Structural ambiguities are treated after a complete parse. In a practical setting, the best strategy would probably be to produce a complete parse, to solve lexical ambiguities and then to solve structural ambiguities for the remaining parses.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> We propose, for some types of ambiguities that can arise, paraphrastk; transformations that make ambiguous relations explicit. paraphrasing step, the generation being for the same language as the source language. The process is illustrated below.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5">  Each parse tree will be sent tea paraphrasing grammar, written in the ROBRA transformational system \[Boitet &amp; alii 80\]. Then, each paraphrased tree will be sent to a generator to produce the  corresponding string. The whole process is very similar to a second generation translation process, the transfer step being replaced by a C. SOME EXAMPLES OF PARAPHRASTIC TRANSFORMATIONS 1. Scope of coordination. The nominal phrase &amp;quot;perturbations in the atmosphere and radiation&amp;quot; may have two interpretations as shown below.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6">  have : 1. (perturbations (in the atmosphere (and radiation))) 2. (perturbations (the atmosphere) (and radiation)) This kind of presentation (or a similar projective scheme) is used in the DLT project of BSO (personal communication, 1987) and in \[Tomita 84\]. A conjunction of coordination van be used to &amp;quot;factorize&amp;quot; a phrase. The explanation of the scope of the coordination will be the &amp;quot;developement&amp;quot; and the permutation of the factorized terms. The presentation using the paraphrasing scheme would be as follows : &gt; pertubations in the atmosphere and radiation 1. perturbations in the radiation and perturbations in the atmosphere 2. radiation and perturbations in the atmosphere 2. AP as NP complement or VP complement: &amp;quot;Le magistrat  Using explicit paraphrasing of the determination with a relative pronoun, we may have :  &gt; le magistrat juge les enfants coupables 1. le magistrat juge les enfants qui sent coupables (the magistrate judges the children who are guilty) 2. le magistrat jnge que les enfant sent coupables.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> (the magistrate judges that the children are guilty) 3. Subject and object. The sentence &amp;quot;Which author quotes this lecturer ?&amp;quot; may have two interpretations, sf is the syntactic function whose value may be the subject (subj) or the first object (objl) of  the governor of the sentence, &amp;quot;quotes&amp;quot;. There is also an ambiguity with the argument place (argO, argl) for logical relations (It). In this case, we may present the structures normalizing the sentence to active declarative form. Note that the phrase structures in this example are identical.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8">  &gt; Which author quotes this lecturer ? 1. the lecturer quotes the author 2, the author quotes the lecturer 4. A well known example. The sentence &amp;quot;Mary sees a man in  Mary a man N P In the park N P I with a telescope For paraphrasing, we have to move circumstancials ahead aud if there is more than one, to coordinate them. We have also to make noun phrase determinations explicit by using relative pronouns and, if there is more than one determination for the same noun phrase, we coordinate them. We should have then :  &gt; Mary sees a man in the park with a telescope 1. with a telescope, in the park, Mary sees a man 2. in the park which has a telescope, Mary sees a man 3. with a telescope, Mary sees a man who is in the park 4. Mary sees a man who has a telescope and who is in the park 5. Mary sees a man who is in the park which has a telescope  We have presented a new approach for interactive translation based on the paraphrasing of ambiguous sentences. Compared to others \[Ducrot 82, Melby &amp; alii 80, Tomita 84\], this proposal makes a step forward to the user level of understanding, transfering part of the burden of interaction from the man to the machine : no special linguistic knowledge is required but the simple (!) everyday competence of the user of language. This could be realized using only linguistic paraphrastic transformations on the output of the parser. Some simple examples have been presented using quite simple transformations : in the case of ambiguous PP attachment there are two possibilities : (1) the PP modifies a noun phrase and this could be made explicit by using a relative pronoun; (2) the PP modifies the sentence and it can be moved ahead of it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> A set of paraphrastic transformations is now being developed to be able to write a transformational grammar that will allow experiments on a corpus.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="787" end_page="787" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
Notes
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> 1. In the case of technical documents, the operator (linguist, translator or documentalis0 may not have enough knowledge to solve some question. For example, in the sentence &amp;quot;the experiment requires carbon and nitrogen tetraoxyde&amp;quot; \[Gerber &amp; Boitet 85\], the scope of &amp;quot;and&amp;quot; is ambiguous and we may read either &amp;quot;carbon tetraoxyde and nitrogen tetraoxyde&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;nitrogen tetraoxyde and carbon&amp;quot;. To be able to choose correctly, we have to know that carbon tetraoxyde does not exist in ordinary chemistry. But again, this conclusion could be false in a very special s6tting, e.g. an experiment described by the text in which carbon tetraoxyde is being produced as an (unstable) intermediate product of th reaction! 2. It may be possible to organise the interaction simply by presenting the set of definitions of the transfer dictionary for each unit having  several equivalent in the target language, and ask tim author to choose one of them.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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