Old Men and Women in Glasses : a Headache for Computational Linguists

The issue of automatic processing of coordinate constructions (mainly NPs) with preand/or postmodifiers is investigated. The paper describes the CASSEX package which is capable of conjunction processing, illustrated with a group of English sentences containing modified coordinate NPs which are parsed and translated into Chinese by the package. 0. Introduction For a machine translation system to be fully automatic, one task it faces is to resolve the ambiguities caused by coordinate constructions. None of the existing systems can claim a satisfactory resolution of this problem, though. For instance, in the machine translation (MT) system designed by (Nagao et al 82), when dealing with conjunctions, only the nearest two items of the same parts of speech were processed, while the following types of coordinated constructions were not analysed correctly : (noun + prep + noun) + and + (noun + prep + noun); (adj + noun) + and + noun.. (*) Present mailing address: Cognitive Studies Centre, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, England.