Predicting and Using a Pragmatic Component of Lexical Aspect

of Simple Past Verbal Tenses for Improving English-to-French Machine Translation

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for improving the results of a statistical Machine Translation system using boundedness, a pragmatic component of the verbal phrase’s lexical aspect. First, the paper presents manual and automatic annotation experiments for lexical aspect in English-French parallel corpora. It will be shown that this aspectual property is identified and classified with ease both by humans and by automatic systems. Second, Statistical Machine Translation experiments using the boundedness annotations are presented. These experiments show that the information regarding lexical aspect is useful to improve the output of a Machine Translation system in terms of better choices of verbal tenses in the target language, as well as better lexical choices. Ultimately, this work aims at providing a method for the automatic annotation of data with boundedness information and at contributing to Machine Translation by taking into account linguistic data.