A generic framework for Arabic to English machine ... - Acsu Buffalo

4.3. BASIC MACHINE TRANSLATION STRATEGIES
To apply our framework to other generation languages, we only need to change the gen-
eration phases. The intermediate representation is independent of the target language,
and this is the benefit of using an Interlingua approach, since analysis and generation are
separate tasks which are implemented independently.
4.3.4 Transfer systems
Transfer systems are a middle course between direct and Interlingua MT strategies.
Transfer systems divide translation into steps which clearly differentiate source lan-
guage and target language parts. In the transfer approach there is therefore no language-
independent representation: the source language intermediate representation is specific
to a particular language, as is the target language intermediate representation. There is no
necessary equivalence between the source and target intermediate representations for the
same language. In the transfer strategy a source language sentence is first parsed into an
internal representation. Thereafter a transfer is made at both lexical and structural levels
into equivalent structures of the target language. In the third stage a translation is gener-
ated. Whereas the Interlingua approach requires complete resolution of all ambiguities
in the source language text so that translation into any other language is possible, in the
transfer approach only those ambiguities inherent in the language in question are tackled.
This approach is a development over direct translation and this was lexically driven. The
level of transfer differs from system to system - the representation varies from only syn-
tactic deep structure to syntactic-semantic interpret trees. A multilingual transfer model
with eight languages pairs is presented in Figure 4.3.
In comparison with the Interlingua system there are clear disadvantages in the transfer
approach. The addition of a new language involves not only the two modules for analy-
sis and generation, but also the addition of new transfer modules, the number of which
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