Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper introduces an implemented scheme for generating target-language sentences using a compositional representation of meaning called lexical conceptual structure. Lexical conceptual structure facilitates two crucial operations associated with generation: lexical selection and syntactic realization. The compositional nature of" the representation is particularly valuable for these two operations when semantically equivalent source- and target-language words and phrases are structurally or thematically divergent. For example, the English verb to stab may be translated as the composite Spanish form dar cuchilladas a (literally, to knife or to give knife-wounds to). To determine the correct lexical items and syntactic realization associated with the surface form in such cases, the underlying lexical-semantic forms are systematically mapped to the target language syntactic structures. The mode described constitutes a lexical-semantic extension to UNITRAN,a syntactic-based translation system that is bidirectional between Spanish and English.'