Etiquetado semiautomático del rasgo semántico de animicidad para su uso en un sistema de traducción automática

Abstract

The ambiguity related to the use of movement and localisation declension cases in Basque is a serious problem in the morphological generation phase in Machine Translation. We present the approach we have developed to solve this ambiguity. Information about the [±animate] semantic feature of the lemma we want to decline is necessary to choose the appropriate suffix. The lexical database used does not contain such information. Besides, it would be very hard to add it manually to the 28.000 substantives contained in it. For this reason, we made two experiments to obtain the [±animate] feature from other resources. First, our aim was to get automatically the required knowledge from corpora, but the results were not good. Secondly, after a minimal manual tagging and using semantic relations between words extracted from definitions of a monolingual dictionary, we tagged more than half of the words in real texts with the [±animate] feature.