An integrated model for the treatment of time in machine translation systems

One of the ways to achieve a good translation of verbal forms is the morphosp~tactic approach, which consists in a function pairing the different morphological tenses that occur in a given language with the tenses of the other language. Complicated rules must be established to calculate the right pair for an expression, because of the amount of discrepancies that differmnt languages show with respect to each other. The way we have chosen to deal with this problem is, conversely, the projection of the different values coming from verbs (type, processivity, morftense, morfaspect, moodrequire~nent), from adverbs, prepositional phrases and temporal N~S (deixis, espect, iteration), and from subordinate conjunctions (aspect, moodrequirement). All this information permits to obtain a final value for aspect .~nd tense for the whole sentence, which later on i8 percolated, not only to the verb node, but also to the the rest of elements conveying information. Our proposal relies on the fact that tense/aspect calculation is relevant not only for a good translation of verbs, but also for a good translation of adverbs, PPs, temporal I~.~ and conjunctions, as we have intended to demonstrat~ ~n this paper.