Translation using Minimal Recursion Semantics

Abstract

We describe minimal recursion semantics (MRS), a framework for semantics within HPSG, which considerably simplies transfer and generation. We discuss why, in general, a semantic representation with minimal structure is desirable for transfer and illustrate how a descriptively adequate representation with a non-recursive structure may be achieved. The paper illustrates the application of MRS to transfer with a series of examples and compares the approach to others which have been previously adopted within unication based frameworks. Our account involves the use of both language-specic and interlingual predicates or relations and we illustrate how this may be exploited to allow MRS to be used to investigate dierent lexical semantic approaches. 1 Semantic representation and transfer In this paper we describe a semantic representation for HPSG known as minimal recursion semantics (MRS), which is being utilized in the English grammar being developed for the Verbmobil project. Verbmobil...