Semantic Transfer in Speech-to-Speech MT

This paper describes a semantic transfer approach called MinT (Minimal Transfer) that has been developed in the speech-to-speech MT system verbmobil. Being a uniication-based and lexicalist semantic transfer model, it relies on some central ideas of the MRS-based transfer approach outlined in Copestake et al., 1995]. It diiers, however, from the latter in certain aspects. In MinT, the idea of abstraction and underspeciication is worked out in much more detail and has been applied to a variety of translation phenomena. MinT relates SL and TL semantic descriptions on a maximally abstract level, without falling back into the well-known problems of the Interlingua approach. This results in simultaneously decreasing the number of transfer rules and leaving a considerable amount of options for lexicalization and grammaticalization up to the generator. To preserve ambiguities that hold across the languages involved MinT processes underspeciied semantic representations.