Handling non-compositionality in multilingual CNLs

TL;DR

This paper presents methods to detect and handle non-compositional constructions in multilingual controlled natural languages using GF, improving flexibility and translation quality.

Contribution

It introduces novel techniques for identifying and integrating non-compositional phrases into GF grammars, enhancing multilingual CNLs.

Findings

Effective detection of multiword expressions in multiple languages.

Improved machine translation performance with integrated nominal compounds.

Qualitative analysis confirms the usefulness of the methods.

Abstract

In this paper, we describe methods for handling multilingual non-compositional constructions in the framework of GF. We specifically look at methods to detect and extract non-compositional phrases from parallel texts and propose methods to handle such constructions in GF grammars. We expect that the methods to handle non-compositional constructions will enrich CNLs by providing more flexibility in the design of controlled languages. We look at two specific use cases of non-compositional constructions: a general-purpose method to detect and extract multilingual multiword expressions and a procedure to identify nominal compounds in German. We evaluate our procedure for multiword expressions by performing a qualitative analysis of the results. For the experiments on nominal compounds, we incorporate the detected compounds in a full SMT pipeline and evaluate the impact of our method in machine translation process.