Generation of Vietnamese for French-Vietnamese and English-Vietnamese Machine Translation

This paper presents the implementation of the Vietnamese generation module in ITS3, a multilingual machine translation (MT) system based on the Government & Binding (GB) theory. Despite well-designed generic mechanisms of the system, it turned out that the task of generating Vietnamese posed non-trivial problems. We therefore had to deviate from the generic code and make new design and implementation in many important cases. By developing corresponding bilingual lexicons, we obtained prototypes of French-Vietnamese and English-Vietnamese MT, the former being the first known prototype of this kind. Our experience suggests that in a principle-based generation system, the parameterized modules, which contain language-specific and lexicalized properties, deserve more attention, and the generic mechanisms should be flexible enough to facilitate the integration of these modules.