Knowledge-Based Machine Translation, The CMU Approach

Building on the well-established premise that reliable machine translation requires a significant degree of. text comprehension, this paper presents a recent advance in multi-lingual knowledge-based machine translation (KBMT). Unlike previous approaches, the current method provides for separate syntactic and semantic knowledge sources that are integrated dynamically for parsing and generation. Such a separation enables the system to have syntactic grammars, language specific but domain general, and semantic knowledge bases, domain specific but language general. Subsequently, grammars and domain knowledge are precompiled automatically in any desired combination to produce very efficient and very thorough real-time parsers. A pilot implementation of our KBMT architecture using functional grammars and entity-oriented semantics demonstrates the feasibility of the new approach.