Telicity as a cue to temporal and discourse structure in Chinese-English machine translation

Machine translation between any two languages requires the generation of information that is implicit in the source language. In translating from Chinese to English, tense and other temporal information must be inferred from other grammatical and lexical cues. Moreover, Chinese multiple-clause sentences may contain inter-clausal relations (temporal or otherwise) that must be explicit in English (e.g., by means of a discourse marker). Perfective and imperfective grammatical aspect markers can provide cues to temporal structure, but such information is not present in every sentence. We report on a project to use the lexical aspect features of (a)telicity reflected in the Lexical Conceptual Structure of the input text to suggest tense and discourse structure in the English translation of a Chinese newspaper corpus.