Ambiguity preserving machine translation using packed representations

Abstract

In this paper we present an ambiguity preserving translation approach which transfers ambiguous LFG f-structure representatios. It is based on packed f-structure representations which are the result of potentially ambiguous utterances. If the ambiguities between source and target language can be preserved, no unpacking during transfer is necessary and the generator may produce utterances which maximally cover the underlying ambiguities. We convert the packed f-structure descriptions into a flat set of prolog terms which consist of predicates, their predicate argument structure and additional attribute-value information. Ambiguity is expressed via local disjunctions. The flat representations facilitate the application of a Shake-and-Bake like transfer approach extended to deal with packed ambiguites.