SEM-I Rational MT - Enriching Deep Grammars with a Semantic Interface for Scalable Machine Translation.

In the LOGON machine translation system where semantic transfer using Minimal Recursion Se- mantics is being developed in conjunction with two existing broad-coverage grammars of Nor- wegian and English, we motivate the use of a grammar-specific semantic interface (SEM-I )t o facilitate the construction and maintenance of a scalable translation engine. The SEM-I is a the- oretically grounded component of each gram- mar, capturing several classes of lexical regular- ities while also serving the crucial engineering function of supplying a reliable and complete specification of the elementary predications the grammar can realize. We make extensive use of underspecification and type hierarchies to max- imize generality and precision.