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

4.4.2.2 Homograph
4.4. LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF MT
The second type of lexical ambiguity occurs when a word can have two or more differ-
ent meanings. Linguists distinguish between homographs, homophones and polysemes.
Homographs are two (or more) ‘words’ with quite different meanings which have the
same spelling: example, light (not dark or not heavy). Many Arabic words can have two
or more overlapping meanings examples; ֓i֒lān could be announcement, advertisement,
declaration or sign. Also,
mrkz could be centre, position, rank or status.
Moreover, mwq֒ could be position, rank, site or status. The direct approach has
particular problems with homographs; the usual method of resolving homograph ambi-
guities is to look at the closest words for clues.
4.4.3 Syntactic ambiguity
Syntactic ambiguity arises when there is more than one way of analysing the underlying
structure of a sentence according to the grammar used in the system. Example, I know a
man with a dog who has fleas, is ambiguous. It could be the man or the dog who has fleas.
It is the syntax not the meaning of the words which is unclear. The classical example is
He saw the girl with the telescope. For the purposes of this discussion, we represent these
examples in the notation of a context-tree grammar rather than in RRG notation.
The two trees in Figure 4.5 and Figure 4.6 represent the two different analyses in the
sense of recording two different ‘parse histories’. In linguistic terms, they correspond to
the two readings of the sentence: one in which the PP is part of the NP (i.e. the girl has
the telescope), and the other where the PP is the same level as the subject (i.e. the man
has the telescope). For convenience, a bracketed notation for trees is sometimes used:
the equivalents for the trees in Figure 4.5 and Figure 4.6 are shown in (4.1a) and (4.1b)
respectively.
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