Metonymy: Reassessment, Survey of Acceptability, and its Treatment in a Machine Translation System

In this article we outline a basic approach to treating metonymy properly in a multilingual machine translation system. This is the first attempt at treating metonymy in an machine translation environment. The approach is guided by the differences of acceptability of metonymy which were obtained by our comparative survey among three languages, English, Chinese, and Japanese. The characteristics of the approach are as follows: (1) Influences of the context, individuals, and familiality with metonymy are not used. (2) An actual acceptability of each metonymic expression is not realized directly. (3) Grouping metonymic examples into patterns is determined by the acceptability judgement of the speakers surveyed as well as the analysts' intuition. (4) The analysis and generation components treat metonymy differently using the patterns. (5) The analysis component accepts a wider range of metonymy than the actual results of the survey, and the generation component treats metonymy more strictly than the actual results. We think that the approach is a starting point for more sophisticated approaches to translation in a multilirtgual machine translation environment. INTRODUCTION Among others, both Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and Fass (1991) divide metonymic expressions into several fixed patterns such as Part-For-Whole and Container-ForContent. Sentence (1) is a typical Container-For-Content metonymy and "this glass" is replaced with "the liquid in this glass" in its metonymic reading. (1) "He drank this glass." One of the things that has been less focused on in previous literature on metonymy is the problem of generation typically in a machine translation system. For example, even though the analysis component of a machine translation system produces a correct metonymic reading for sentence (1), i.e. "the liquid in this glass" for "this glass", if the result of the analysis component is translated directly in word-forword manner, such an output sentence may not be natural in the target language. On the other hand, it may not be appropriate either for the generation component to produce a sentence which is a direct translation of the original metonymy if the target language does not allow such expression. We think it is necessary for a multilingual machine translation system to have not only understanding of metonymy which most previous works on metonymy have focused on, but also proper ways to handle generation of metonymy. In order to find out ways to treat metonymy properly in a multilingual environment, we have conducted a survey on acceptability of various examples of metonymy among English, Chinese, and Japanese. The patterns of previous works (Fass 1991, Lakoff and