A simple unification method for CFG

• Main Author: Fontanilla, Gian Kristian A.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Machine translating; Computer Sciences
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/5175
• Institution: De La Salle University

Rule-based machine translation is an approach that uses linguistic information in order to translate. Various formalisms, such as LFG2 , and HPSG3, GPSG4, which are based on CFG, can be used as the underlying formalism in machine translation. These grammars perform unification in order to check the functional well-formedness of a sentence, which is particularly useful in translation. However, the unification approach employed by these grammars is diagnostic, which is of limited use during transfer and generation. Unification-based grammars also require extensive linguistic information, such as the schemata in LFG, which is difficult to build given limited language resources and experts. In this paper, a simple corrective unification method is presented, which is to be used alongside a standard CFG. This unification method can be used to maintain language phenomena, such as subject-verb agreement in English, among others. This unification method is used by a hybrid machine translation system for Filipino-English called HyFilEngMT.