transfer and

Problems of

interlingua
Analysis
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 Members of the group 17th

Succia Putri Nabila (A1B019054)

Silvi Aliza (A1B0190430)

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Asy-syifa Rahmah (A1B019104)

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 Lexical differences
● Transfer ambiguities arise when a
single source language word can
potentially be translated by a
number of different target
language words or expressions, not
because the source language word
itself is ambiguous but because it is
’ambiguous’ from the perspective of
another language. Most differences
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● Conceptual translational ambiguities
arise when a single ‘concept’ represented
by one word in one language corresponds
to a number of concepts, and hence words,
in another language.
● Translational ambiguities occur when
the choice of target language lexical
equivalent depends on differences of
register or text-type

in the lexical systems of language

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arise from conceptual differences, ● Grammatical translational ambiguities

but there are also those arising occur when there is a lexical choice in the
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from stylistic or grammatical target language which is conditioned by

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grammatical context
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differences.
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 Structural Differences
Many relatively trivial syntactic differences between
languages are well known e.g in French most adjectives
follow nouns but in English adjectives normally precede
the nouns they qualify. A good example is the passive. In
English, this is defined as any construction formed with
the auxiliary verb be and the past participle. Even when
translating into a language which has a similar
construction, it is not always appropriate – or even
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possible – to use that construction.

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Example
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 Levels of transfer representation
In describing the strategies for MT systems, it was noted
that the basic differences lie in the relative sizes of the
three companies; analysis, transfer and generation. The
direct method stands at one extremen, the interlingua
method at the other, with transfer-based systems
between them. The well-know ‘pyramid’ diagram below
is often to illustrate this point.

To illustrate the various levels of transfer in these different types of

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systems, we describe the kinds of analysis that could be required,

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working, ‘upwards’ from the base of the pyramid to the apex. In

most cases, reprensations will be tree structures, and typically carry
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rather more information than is often shown when linguists discuss

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parse-tress or deep-structures representations

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 The analysis identifies grammatical categories, the syntactic number
(singular) or plural) of nouns and the tense of verbs, but there is no
identification of relations between words (e.g determines and
nouns) or of groupings (noun phrases). In a crude word-for word
system transfer would consist simply in the substitution of source
language words (with category features) by target words (with
corresponding features) as in (19a), with perhaps resulting target
text (19b). the resulting translation would be clearly inadequate.

One answer to the problem of excessive lexical and structural detail

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in the dictionary is to conduct statistical analyses of texts and thus

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to derive probability measures for converting source language words

or expressions into target words or expressions.
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 Transfer-based systems Lexical transfer

Lexical transfer consists of the

Some early transfer-based systems
assumed that successful structural
transformations between languages
must be based on ‘deeper’ analysis, one
which includes at least some indication of
functional relations. There are two basic
aspect in transfer: lexical transfer and
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replacement of a source lexical item by a
target lexical item. Obviously if there is
only one target language equivalent,
then there is no problem, except where
there are attendant differences of
syntactic structure

Equally unproblematic for lexical transfer

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structural transfer. Both of this can cause

are many-to-one translations, e,g
problem:
German mauers and wand, both
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translate as English wall. The problem

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arise with the numerous one-to-many

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translations of lexical items.

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 Structural Transfer

Structural transfer is Some problems of structural transfer are

necessary when the easier to solve than others. Consider a
structure inherited from sentence like “Jones likes the film” and it’s
the source language is translation into French “le film plait a
inappropriate for the jones”. While like can be said to translate
target language. In as plaire, the corresponding structures do
Theory the deeper not match, since the subject of like has to
analysis goes, the less be mapped onto the indirect object of
plaire, while the object of like becomes the
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likely this problem is to

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occur, since the deepening subject. This can be transfer as a structural

analysis aims at ‘transfer rule’ formulated in a quite
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straightforward way. And there are a lot of

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neutralizing the
other example of structural transfer that
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distinctions between
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you can find.

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langauges.
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 Transfer with structural interlingua

The preblems of structural tranfer underline the problems with representations which do not neutralize
sufficiently the idiosyncracies of even the deep structures of the respective language. A more common basis
for an interlingual representation is the use of some of the ideas found in Case grammar. Case roles (also
known as ‘deep cases’ ‘semantic roles’, thematic roles’ or ‘theta roles’) are semantic relations such as Agent,
Patient, Experiencer, Instrument.
Case structure representations are frequently supposed to reflect universals of syntax which could be regarded
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as interlingual. Use of case roles is widespread in bilingual transfer-based MT systems, particularly when one
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if the languages is Japanese since Case grammar seems to be more appropriate as an analysis model for this
language than kind of phrase structure model often applied to European languages.
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 Interlingua-based systems

In interlingua MT systems, the result of source language analysis is a

language interpendent representation of the text which is the basis for
the generation of the target language text. The disadvantages arise
from the fact that analysis and generation have to be strictly
separated; it is not desirable to orient analysis towards a particular
target language and it not possible during generation to look back at
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the original source language text.

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 Structural representation in interlingua system
One candidate for interlingua representation in the use of the formulae of propositional logic, and there has been
some experimentation in this area. A representation nased on logical formulae might be something like:

all (X), government (X), indefinite (Y), plural (Y), support (Y, X, T), depend-on (X, Y, T), timeless (T)
Most interlingua-based systems use representations which are essentially structures like thise seen in the
previous section for transfer-based systems: the difference is in the abstractness of the representation of
structure, and in the treatment of lexical items.
There is general agreement among proponents of the interlingua approach the representations should be
hierarchies of substructures showing clear interrelationships. The implicattions of neutral structural
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representations can be illustrated by considering differences of word order between languages, and their
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significance. In English, word order is the primary means of distinguishing grammatical functions like subject
and object. Example:
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a. The man chased the shark

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b. The shark chased the man

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 Structural representation in interlingua system

● Word order alone determines which noun phrase in the ‘chaser’ (the subject), and
which is the ‘chased’ (the object).
● The implication for an interlingua is that it is not enough to indicate word order on
its own: the interlingua must represent the significance in terms of syntactic relations
(grammatical function), topic-focus relations (text function), determination, case role
or whatever else the interpretation of the word-order dictates. In an interlingual
representation it is not sufficient to characterise some structure simply as ‘passive’:
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rather the representation has to reflect the interpretation of those aspects of the
meaning of the sentence as a whole which are indicated by use of the passive.
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 Lexical representation in interlingua systems

As with structural differences, the problem for the interlingua approach is again teo-
fold: deciding on the most appropriate neutral representation, and discovering
the procedures for extracting the necessary information from texts. In transfer-
based systems there are no problems if for a particular language pair there are
one-to-one equivalents; the no problems come when there is more than one
target word for single source word.
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It is a massive undertaking, even for closely relate languages. For example if

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Spanish is one of the language included, the distinctions between the legs of
humans, animals, chairs and tables has to be made in the interligua even if when
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translation between English and Germen this distinction in irrelevant.

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 ‘Restricted’ interlinguas
An interlingua would neutralise the
differences between the languages in
the sustem but take advantage of
their accidental similarities. The
interlingua approach might be
feasible because there languages
have much in common, both lexical
correspondences and similarities in
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grammatical structures. In most cass,

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an interlingua is
REPRESENTATION , i.e. a data
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structure in the computational sense

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o the word, and not a LANGUAGE

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in the usual sense at all.

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 Knowledge-based methods
Translation should be based on non-linguistic conceptual representations, or- in
alternative formulations - on representations of meaning derived from the
processes of understanding if texts. Understanding a text involves relating
what is said in a text to phenomena outside the text. Readers interpret texts
with reference to what they know about ‘real world’ or what worlds they
can imagine.

The practical complexity of the task inevitably restricts the approach to highly
restricted domains with relatively narrow contexts and applications. It also
true to say that knowledge-based MT systems have so far concentrated on
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the disambiguation of source texts and have not tackled the derivation of
universal language-independent representations capable of providing
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information for generation in any other language.

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 Example based methods
Proposals for example-based methods are put forward generally as alternatives to knowledge-based
approaches and as supplementary aids to the traditional rule-based methods of analysis, transfer and
generation. The linguistic databank of ‘examples’ would be derived from a structural analysis of a
large corpus of source texts and their translations in target language produced by human translators.

The example-based approach is particularly attractive for the translation of complex noun phrases.
Example-based techniques can also be used fro translation sentences which are structurally similar
to previously translated sentence. The example-based method should be distinguished from corpus-
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based approaches. Example-based methods are not necessarily restricted either to particular corpora
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or to partcular sublanguages. The example-based approach can be integrated in any of the basic
models: direct, transfer, and interlingua. Unlike the knowledge-based method, which is dependent
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on semantic analysis to high degree of abstraction.

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 Summary: comparison of transfer based and interlingua-based systems

At the other extreme, the ‘conceptual meaning’ representations required for interlingua-based systems
demand a complexity of semantic analysis beyond the limitations of current linguistic theory. It is
generally agreed that transfer-based approaches are at present the best foundations for advances in MT.
The flexibility of the transfer-based approach overcomes one apprent drawback in comparison with
interlingua systems, namely the cost of adding a new language to the system.

The differences between transfer and interlingua systems are relative. In practice, many systems which are
described as ‘interlingual’ deal only with a single pair of language, so they differ little in ‘depth’ of
abstractness and universality from many transfer-based systems. The transfer-based framework there are
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also many possible variants.an interlingua system it is difficult to focus specifically on the contrastive
aspects of translations, because the interlingua forces the linguist to abstract away from that aspect of
translation
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Thank you!
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