The Case for a MT Developers' Tool with a Two-Component View of the Interlingua1

The interlingua (IL) in machine translation (MT) systems can be defined in terms of two components: (i) "lexical IL forms" within language-specific lexicons where each lexical entry has associated with it one or more lexical representations, and (ii) algorithms for creating and decom- posing the instantiated "pivot" representation. Within this framework, we examine five different approaches to the level of representation for the lexical IL forms and then discuss a tool, ILustrate,2 we are building to develop and evaluate different IL representations coupled with their correspond- ing translation algorithms.