Bi-Lexical Rules for Multi-Lexeme Translation in Lexicalist MT

The paper presents a prototype lexicalist Machine Translation system (based on the so-called ‘Shake-and-Bake’ approach of Whitelock (1992)) consisting of an analysis component, a dynamic bilingual lexicon, and a generation component, and shows how it is applied to a range of MT problems. Multi-Lexeme translations are handled through bi-lexical rules which map bilingual lexical signs into new bilingual lexical signs. It is argued that much translation can be handled by equating translationally equivalent lists of lexical signs, either directly in the bilingual lexicon, or by deriving them through bi-lexical rules. Lexical semantic information organized as Qualia structures (Pustejovsky 1991) is used as a mechanism for restricting the domain of the rules.