Multiple Discourse Relations on the Sentential Level in Japanese Multiple Discourse Relations on the Sentential Level in Japanese

Gehh ort zum Antragsabschnitt: 8 Die vorliegende Arbeit wurde im Rahmen des Verbundvorhabens Verbmobil vom Bundesministeriumf ur Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie (BMBF) unter dem FF orderkennzeichen 01 IV 101 R geff ordert. Die Verantwortung f ur den Inhalt dieser Arbeit liegt bei dem Autor. Abstract In the spoken language machine translation project Verbmobil, the semantic formalism Language for Underspeciied Discourse representation structures (LUD) is used. LUD describes a number of DRSs and allows for underspeciication of scopal ambiguities. Dealing with Japanese-to-English translation besides German-to-English poses challenging problems. In this paper, a treatment of multiple discourse relation constructions on the sen-tential level is discussed. These are common in Japanese but cause a problem for the formalism. It is shown that the underspeciication is to be represented for them, too. Additionally, it is possible to state a semantic constraint on the resolution of multiple discourse relations which seems to prevail over the syntactic c-command constraint.