A Rationale for Using UNL as an Interlingua and More in Various Domains

The UNL language of semantic graphs may be called as a "seman- tico-linguistic" interlingua. As a successor of the technically and commercially successful ATLAS-II and PIVOT interlinguas, its potential to support various kinds of text MT is certain, even if some improvements would be welcome, as always. It is also a strong candidate to be used in spoken dialogue translation systems when the utterances to be handled are not only task-oriented and of limited variety, but become more free and truly spontaneous. Finally, although it is not a true representation language such as KRL and its frame-based and logic-based successors, and although its associated "knowledge base" is not a true ontology, but rather a kind of immense thesaurus of (interlingual) sets of word senses, it seems particularly well suited to the processing of multilingual information in natural language (information retrieval, abstracting, gisting, etc.).The UNL format of multilingual documents aligned at the level of utter- ances is currenly embedded in html (call it UNL-html), and used by various tools such as the UNL viewer. By using a simple transformation, one obtains the UNL-xml format, and profit from all tools currently developed around XML. In this context, UNL may find another application in the localization of multilingual textual resources of software packages (messages, menu items, help files, and examples of use in multilingual dictionaries.)

[1]  Mathieu Lafourcade,et al.  Synonymies et vecteurs conceptuels , 2001, JEPTALNRECITAL.

[2]  Martin Kay,et al.  The MIND System , 1970 .

[3]  Hiroshi Maruyama.  An Interactive Japanese Parser for Machine Translation , 1990, COLING.

[4]  Christian Boitet,et al.  Multilingual Dialogue-Based MT for monolingual authors: the LIDIA project and a first mockup , 1994, Machine Translation.

[5]  Eric Wehrli,et al.  The Ips System , 1992, COLING.

[6]  Christian Boitet Geta.  GETA's MT methodology and its current development towards personal networking communication and spee , 1997 .

[7]  Teruko Mitamura,et al.  The KANT System: Fast, Accurate, High-Quality Translation in Practical Domains , 1992, COLING.

[8]  Mathieu Lafourcade.  Lexical sorting and lexical transfer by con-ceptual vectors , 2001 .

[9]  Hervé Blanchon.  Perspectives of DBMT for monolingual authors on the basis of LIDIA-1, an implemented mock-up , 1994, COLING.

[10]  Walid Moneimne.  TAO vers l'arabe : spécification d'une génération standard de l'arabe ; réalisation d'un prototype anglais-arabe à partir d'un analyseur existant , 1989 .

[11]  Christian Boitet,et al.  Implementation And Conversational Environment Of ARIANE 78.4, An Integrated System For Automated Translation And Human Revision , 1982, COLING.

[12]  Christian Boitet,et al.  Dialogue-Based MT and self-explaining documents as an alternative to MAHT and MT of controlled languages , 1994, BCS.

[13]  Christian Boitet,et al.  On UNL as the future “html of the linguistic content” & the reuse of existing NLP components in UNL-related applications with the example of a UNL-French deconverter , 2000, COLING.

[14]  Eric Wehrli,et al.  ITS-2 : an interactive personal translation system , 1993, EACL.