An INTERLINGUA FOR DIALOGUE TRANSLATION

An interchange format (IF) suitable for spoken language translation is introduced in this paper. It is a semantic representation of languages and used as a kind of interlingua among different languages. The most obvious characteristics of the semantic representation are its independence of peculiarities of any language and its underspecification. The whole semantic representation has up to four components: speaker tag, speech act, topic and arguments. The development of the interchange format is guided by the corpus of our hotel reservation domain. And the IF has been applied to two languages: Chinese and English. This paper will also discuss the role of the interchange format in our spoken language translation system. 1