Illocutionary Act Based Translation of Dialogues

A new dialogue translation method called the illocutionary act translation method is designed for translating speakers' intentions conveyed by rich expressions in dialogues between humans. One of the most significant characteristics of this method is that it is pragmaticsbased. That is, translation of utterances representing illocutionary acts, which consist of illocutionary forces and propositional contents, is possible while most conventional MT methods are based on syntactic or semantic information and concerned with propositional contents only. The new method extracts illocutionary act relationships from input utterances by using semantic-pragmatic representations called illocutionary act types. These types consist of language-independent illocutionary act concepts and language-dependent propositional content concepts. The method then transfers these into target language illocutionary act types, and finally generates target language utterances. This method combines the features of the transfer approach and the interlingual approach.