The Problem of Lexical Sense Ambiguity in Multilingual Communication

• Lucia Specia USP
• Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes USP

Abstract

In this paper it is presented a discussion about the problem of word sense ambiguity in computational systems aiming at multilingual communication, specially at machine translation from English into Brazilian Portuguese. In order to do this, examples of sentences showing the implications of this linguistic phenomenon and the way it is addressed by different machine translators are analyzed. The goal is to demonstrate the importance of such module in an English-Portuguese multilingual communication system and then justify the purpose of a word sense disambiguation model between these two languages.

References

Brown, P., Della Pietra, S., Della Pietra, V. and Mercer, R. (1991) “Word sense disambiguation using statistical methods”, In: Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Berkeley, p. 264-270.

Burnard, L. (2000) “Reference Guide for the British National Corpus (World Edition)”, Oxford University Press.

Dorr, B. J. and Katsova, M. (1998) “Lexical Selection for Cross-Language Applications: Combining LCS with WordNet”, In: Proceedings of AMTA’1998, Langhorne, p. 438-447.

Fossey, M.F., Pedrolongo, T., Martins, R. T. and Nunes, M. G. V. (2004) “Análise comparativa de tradutores automáticos inglês-português”, Série de Relatórios do NILC, NILC-TR-04-04, São Carlos, Março, 18p.

Leffa, V. J. (1998) “Textual constraints in L2 lexical disambiguation”, System, Great Britain, 26(2), p. 183-194.

Lee, H. (2002) “Classification Approach to Word Selection in Machine Translation”, In: Proceedings of AMTA’2002, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, p. 114-123.

Montoyo, A., Romero, R., Vazquez, S., Calle, M. and Soler, S. (2002) “The Role of WSD for Multilingual Natural Language Applications”, In: Proceedings of TSD’2002, Czech Republic, p. 41-48.

Oliveira Jr., O.N., Marchi, A.R., Martins, M.S. and Martins, R.T. (2000) “A Critical Analysis of the Performance of English-Portuguese-English MT Systems”, In: Anais do V PROPOR, Atibaia, p. 85-92.

Pedersen, B. S. (1997) “Lexical ambiguity in machine translation: expressing regularities in the polysemy of Danish Motion Verbs”. PhD Thesis, Center for Sprogteknologi, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Specia, L. and Nunes, M.G.V. (2004) “A ambigüidade lexical de sentido na tradução do inglês para o português – um recorte de verbos problemáticos”, Série de Relatórios do NILC, NILC-TR-04-01, São Carlos, Março, 30p.

Zinovjeva, N. (2000) “Learning Sense Disambiguation Rules for Machine Translation”. Master’s Thesis in Language Engineering. Department of Linguistics, Uppsala University.