We describe minimal recursion semantics (MRS), a framework for semantics within HPSG, which considerably simplies transfer and generation. We discuss why, in general, a semantic representation with minimal structure is desirable for transfer and illustrate how a descriptively adequate representation with a non-recursive structure may be achieved. The paper illustrates the application of MRS to transfer with a series of examples and compares the approach to others which have been previously adopted within unication based frameworks. Our account involves the use of both language-specic and interlingual predicates or relations and we illustrate how this may be exploited to allow MRS to be used to investigate dierent lexical semantic approaches. 1 Semantic representation and transfer In this paper we describe a semantic representation for HPSG known as minimal recursion semantics (MRS), which is being utilized in the English grammar being developed for the Verbmobil project. Verbmobil...

We describe a generator for rule-based grammars which are primarily lexicalist but may introduce some semantics via constructions. By combining chart generation with a treatment of modification by adjunction, we obtain substantial performance improvements over standard lexically-driven chart-generation.

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The approach to multilingual lexical representation developed as part of the ACQUILEX Lexical Knowledge Base (LKB) is discussed with specic reference to complex translation equivalence. The treatment described provides a lexicalist account of translation mismatches in terms of translation links which capture cross-linguistic generalizations across sets of semantically related lexical items, and can be readily integrated with several transfer-based MT systems. 1 Introduction The ACQUILEX LKB system was designed to allow the representation of syntactic and semantic information which has been (semi-)automatically extracted from machine readable dictionaries (MRDs). Large scale monolingual lexicon fragments have been constructed semi-automatically for four languages (English, Spanish, Dutch and Italian); descriptions of the monolingual lexicons and the lexical representation language (LRL) are given in, for example, Copestake (1992), Sanlippo and Poznanski (1992) and papers in Briscoe ...

The lexicalist approach to Machine Translation offers significant advantages in the development of linguistic descriptions. However, the Shake-and-Bake generation algorithm of (Whitelock, 1992) is NPcomplete. We present a polynomial time algorithm for lexicalist MT generation provided that sufficient information can be transferred to ensure more determinism. 1

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This paper is a survey of the current machine translation research in the US, Europe and Japan. A short history of machine translation is presented first, followed by an overview of the current research work. Representative examples of a wide range of different approaches adopted by machine translation researchers are presented. These are described in detail along with a discussion of the practicalities of scaling up these approaches for operational environments. In support of this discussion, issues in, and techniques for, evaluating machine translation systems are addressed.

Abstract. A generation algorithm based on an active chart parsing algorithm is introduced which can be used in conjunction with a Shake and Bake machine translation system. A concise Prolog implementation of the algorithm is provided, and some performance comparisons with a shift-reduce based algorithm are given which show the chart generator is much more efficient for generating all possible sentences from an input specification. 1

This document is intended as a description of the current mechanisms in the ACQUILEX LKB for constraint resolution and for the application of tlinks. It does not contain any detailed account of particular translation mismatches etc --- these will be provided (at some point) in Copestake and Sanfilippo (in preparation). This document incorporates some information from previously published sources, on tlinks in particular, in order to provide a single consistent description (see, in particular, Copestake and Sanfilippo, 1993). Eventually this document will form part of the full description of the LKB. 2 Types and constraints

This paper is a detailed discussion of semantic transfer in the context of the Verbmobil Machine Translation project. The use of semantic transfer as a translation mechanism is introduced and justified by comparison with alternative approaches. Some criteria for evaluation of transfer frameworks are discussed and a comparison is made of three different approaches to the representation of translation rules or equivalences. This is followed by a discussion of control of application of transfer rules and interaction with a domain description and inference component.