Contextual deletion of object and ambiguity in machine translation

Abstract

Constructions surfacing as intransitive are highly ambiguous in English. They may be the reflection of a true intransitive verb or, rather, the result of one of the linguistic processes which derive an intransitive construction from a canonical transitive one (e.g. contextual deletion of an understood object, deletion of an optional reflexive marker or disergativization). This type of lexical/structural ambiguity poses many problems in Machine Translation. In this article we offer a possible solution which has been implemented in JULIETTA, a Lexical-Functional Grammar-based machine translation prototype.