Translating the Untranslatable
A solution to the Problem of Generating English Determiners

One of the hardest problems for automatic translation is generating words and inflections that are obligatory in the target language, but not in the source language. This work is the first to provide a fully implemented solution to the problem of generating determiners and determining number. Using a semantic representation and a series of three heuristic algorithms, this solution provides the most probable context-sensitive translation. It gives insight into natural language processing in general, and machine translation, semantic analysis, and generation from underspecified inputs in particular. This book finishes with an extensive evaluation of the implemented algorithms.

Francis Bond is a research scientist at NTT Communication Science Laboratories at the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation.