From Syntax to Semantics

Machine translation is a central aspect of research in artifical intelligence. This book is written in the context of the Machine Translation (MT) project EUROTRA, a multi-lingual MT-project putting special emphasis on the definition of semantic representation. The linguistic design of the system is stratificational insofar as the processes of analysis and synthesis consist of the translation between several linguistically motivated levels. Of these a configurational structure, a syntactic dependency structure, and a functional semantic structure are discussed in this book. The issues raised include syntax, semantics, analysis and generation, and lexical transfer, and the ideas discussed are relevant for any analysis of multilingual machine translation. The authors report on the theoretical definitions, on the implementations of linguistic levels, as well as on tools that have been developed by EUROTRA-D.