Collocations in Multilingual Generation

We present a proposal for the structuring of collocation knowledge 1 in the lexicon of a multilingual generation system and show to what extent it can be used in the process of lexical selection. This proposal is part of Polygloss, a new research project on multilingual generation, and it has been inspired by work carried out in the S EMSYN project (see e.g. [I~(~SNEtt 198812). The descriptive approach presented in this proposal is based on a combination of results from recent lexicographical research and the application of Meaning-Text-Theory (MTT) (see e.g. [MEL'CUK et al. 1981], [MEL'CUK et al. 1984]). We first outline the overall structure of the dictionary system that is needed by a multilingual generator; section 2 gives an overview of the results of lexicographical work on collocations and compares them with "lexical functions" as used in MeaningText-Theory. Section 3 shows how we intend to integrate collocations in the generation dic1We use the term "collocation" in the sense of [HAUSMANN 1985] referring to constraints on the cooccurrence of two lexeme words; the two elements are not completely freely combined, but one of them semantically determines the other one. Examples are for instance solve a problem, turn dark, expose someone to a risk, etc. For a more detailed definition see section 2. 2 Research reported in this paper is supported by the German Bundesministerium fiir Forschung und Technologie, BMFT, under grant No. 08 B 3116 3. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as positions of the project as a whole. tionary and how "lexical functions" can be used in generation. 1 Lexical knowledge for multilingual generation Within a multilingual generation system, it seems necessary to keep the dictionary as modular as possible, separating information that pertains to different levels of linguistic description 3. We assume that the system's lexical knowledge is stored in the following types of "specialized dictionaries": • semantic: inventory of possible lexicalizations of a concept in a given language; syntactic: one inventory of realization classes per language, providing information about number, type and realization of the arguments of a given lexeme; • morphological: one inventory of inflectional classes per language. Since none of these levels of decsription is completely independent, the dictionaries should be linked to each other by means of cross-references and reference to class membership. Templates and mechanisms allowing for explicit inheritance of shared properties, e.g. redundancy rules, will be used within aFor more details on the dictionary structure see [HEID/MOMMA 1989].