The PENMAN Project on Knowledge-Based Machine Translation

of an integrated knowledge-based machine-aided translation system called PANQLOSS. The ISI-specific work includes the development of English sentence generation and sentence planning capabilities and the construction of an Ontology of concepts to act as the semantic lexicon for all modules of the system as a whole. In addition, we continue to enhance Penman's existing generation technology, to collect and develop ancillary knowledge sources and software (such as grammars or bilingual dictionaries and lexicons for German, Japanese, Spanish, and Chinese), and to maintain and distribute Penman. RECENT RESULTS During the past year, the generation component of PAN-CLOSS was installed; PANGLOSS was tested during the first DARPA MT evaluation. This work necessitated the development of code to transfer the output of New Mex-ico's ULTRA parser to a form suitable for Penman. More recently, Penman Project members have been working on the semi-automated construction and acquisition of an Ontology for PANGLOSS. A high-level tax-onomy of the basic concepts required for the processing of ULTRA, the CMU software, and Penman was synthesized out of several sources; this 400-odd node taxonomy we call the Ontology Base (OB). Current work involves migrating wordsense names from LDOCE into WordNet using several automatic techniques and then taxonomiz-ing fragments of WordNet under the OB; at the present time, approx. 11,000 concepts have been so taxonomized and another 10,000 are awaiting final placement. Our goal is an Ontology organized under the OB of approx. 50,000 items. Toward this goal we acquired WordNet from Princeton and an online copy of Roget's thesaurus. Ramping up toward making the Ontology support processing of other languages, we have been collecting multilingual resources of various types. We have acquired an online Japanese-English dictionary (approx. 50,000 entries with phrases), several Chinese-English online dictionaries (approximately equal total size), and are in the process of acquiring the Collins bilingual Spanish-English dictionary. We have also established X-windows based display capabilities for Japanese and Chinese, in-eluding a Japanese emacs editor and dictionary access intertgce. In other work, the core mapping engine of the Sentence Planning module of PANGLOSS has been constructed and is currently being debugged. The Sentence Planner converts representations of texts written in the Pangloss In-terlingua into SPL expressions suitable for Penman. PLANS FOR THE COMING YEAR Three principal efforts are planned for the coming year: the construction of the 50,000-node Ontology, the development of English, Japanese, and Spanish lexicons associated with the Ontology, and the development and …