Interlinguistic Divergences in Papillon Multilingual Dictionary

Mathieu Mangeot (1) , Kyoko Kuroda (2, 3)

1 NII - National Institute of Informatics
2 TESNIERE - Centre de recherche en linguistique et traitement automatique des langues, Lucien Tesnière - UFC (EA 2283)
3 Shimane Prefectural Women's College

The Papillon project aims at building a multilingual pivot dictionary by voluntary contributors in collaboration on the Internet. The data obtained is then publicly available. The macrostructure of the dictionary is composed by a monolingual volume for each language and a pivot volume which links the monolingual entries hrough interlingual links. The microstructure is based on the combinatory and explanatory lexicography, thus fairly rich and very detailed. We discuss here about how to solve the problems raised by the divergence of the predicates' argument structures in a multilingual context. If the entry is a predicate, the semantic formula describing the entry will represent this predicate. However, the number and the position of the arguments may vary a lot among languages. For example, there is a position shift in the arguments between the English predicate "X1 miss Y1" and its French equivalent "X2 manque à Y2" with X1=Y2 and Y1=X2. We propose a way to note this divergence in order to translate structures correctly.

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Mathieu Mangeot, Kyoko Kuroda. Interlinguistic Divergences in Papillon Multilingual Dictionary. Proc. ASIALEX'2003, Meikai University, Aug 2003, Urayasu, Chiba, Japan. pp.33-42. ⟨hal-00968797⟩