Syntactic Theory and Grammar Design for Machine Translation

Recently, the field of machine translation has increasingly reflected the influence of linguistic theory. Some systems have been designed around principles or structures of specific theories (Dorr, 1989; Kaplan, Netter, Wedekind, & Zaenen, 1989; Sharp, 1986), whereas others, adhering less strongly to particular theories, nevertheless reflect great care in considering and adapting the work of linguists. Most notable in this respect is the EUROTRA project as described, for example, in Arnold & des Tombe (1987) and Durand et al. (to appear). There seems to be general agreement that linguistic theory can contribute to machine translation (Raskin, 1987a, 1987b; Wehrli, 1987), but at the same time there is skepticism about its potential to break the barriers to robust, high quality translation (Nagao et al., 1988). As a result, many questions remain about the place of linguistic theory in machine translation.