EasyEnglish: Addressing structural ambiguity

Abstract

EasyEnglish is an authoring tool which is part of IBM’s internal SGML editing environment, Information Development Workbench. EasyEnglish is used as a preprocessing step for machine-translating IBM manuals. Although EasyEnglish does some traditional grammar checking, its focus is on problems of structural ambiguity. Such problems include ambiguous attachment of participles, ambiguous scope in coordination, and ambiguous attachment of the agent phrase for double passives. Since we deal with truly ambiguous constructions, the system has no way of deciding on the desired interpretation; the system provides the user with a choice of rewriting suggestions, each forcing an unambiguousattachment. This paper describes the techniques for identifying structural ambiguities and generating unambiguous rewriting suggestions.