Towards a Thesaurus of Predicates

Abstract

We propose a thesaurus of predicates that can help to resolve pre-editing and/or post-editing problems in machine translation environments. It differs from earlier approaches such as conventional dictionaries in that we are aiming to link a wide range of near-synonyms and paraphrases. We are compiling such similar examples through both introspection and the use of translation data, giving us a large collection of monolingual and bilingual equivalences. This thesaurus enables the following machine translation techniques. (a) Unification of synonymous expressions in the source language (source language paraphrasing). (b) Conversion of homonymous expressions to more easily translated ones (source language rewriting). (c) Development of expressions appearing in the target language into various expressions (target language paraphrasing).

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