Abstraction and underspecification in semantic transfer

Abstract

This paper introduces the semantic transfer approach MinT (Minimal Transfer) that has been developed in the speech-to-speech MT system VERBMOBIL. As a unification-based and lexicalist semantic transfer model, it relies on some central ideas of the MRS-based transfer approach outlined in [Copestake et al., 1995]. It differs, however, from the latter in certain aspects: in MinT, the idea of abstraction and underspecification is worked out in much more detail and has been applied to a variety of translation phenomena. MinT relates SL and TL semantic descriptions on a maximally abstract level, which results in simultaneously decreasing the number of transfer rules and leaving a considerable amount of options for lexicalization and grammaticalization up to the generator. To preserve ambiguities that hold across the involved languages MinT processes underspecified semantic representations.