Reconciling fine-grained lexical knowledge and coarse-grained ontologies in the representation of near-synonyms

A machine translation system must be able to adequately cope with near-synonymy for there are often many slightly different translations available for any given source language word that can each significantly and differently affect the meaning or style of a translated text. Conventional models of lexical knowledge used in natural-language processing systems are inadequate for representing near-synonyms, because they are unable to represent fine-grained lexical knowledge. We will discuss a new model for representing fine-grained lexical knowledge whose basis is the idea of granularity of representation.