Machine Translation of Russian Prepositions

摘要

In the development of a program for Russian-English machine translation a substantial amount of information was generated relative to the translation of Russian prepositions. Empirical studies, based on approximately 240,000 running words of Russian physics texts, reveal the extent of this translation problem in these texts. The contextual determinants of the translation of prepositions were studied: for each occurrence of a multivalent preposition the syntactically related items (dependent and governor) were machine listed. The effect of these items on the translation of the preposition is summarized. (Author)