A Unification-based Approach to Lexicography for Machine Translation System

In an operational machine translation system, a variety of texts will be encountered even if its domain of dexterity is restricted to a specific field. This diversity of texts poses problem on handling different usages or translations of identical lexical items. This paper presents a unification-based method for lexicography that can greatly lessen this problem. In the paper, we give a detailed discussion and example of the unification technique~ We also show that by unifying lexical information in different dictionaries, the time spent in dictionary construction is saved; dictionary storage space is minimized; the integrity of distinct dictionaries is preserved; the option regarding which dictionaries to be unified is kept open; and all of the lexical information needed to construct a complete dictionary based on the vocabulary for a specific customer project is available. In view of the fact that categorial ambiguity might occur as a result of unification, score function is added as a solution. With these advantages, we regard the unification approach to lexicography as viable in enhancing the translation performance of a practical machine translation system.