PREceedings of the Pre-Workshop on ILs and IL approaches to MT

The traditional defining characteristic of an Interlingua, according to Hutchins & Somers (p. 73), is that it "is neutral between two or more languages" so that, in principle, given a representation of an utterance in the Interlingua, the source language of the utterance cannot be determined from that representation. From this follow the other general features of an Interlingual MT system: the independence of analysis and generation, the use of language-independent knowledge sources, the attempt to represent the "meaning" of the text using the Interlingua, the claim to "universality," and the abstract nature of Interlingual representations.