Universal Grammar and lexis for quick ramp-up of MT systems

Abstract

This paper introduces Boas, a semi-automatic knowledge elicitation system that guides a team of two people through the process of developing the static knowledge sources for a moderate-quality, broad-coverage MT system from any "low-density" language into English in about six months. The paper focuses on some issues in the elicitation of descriptive knowledge in Boas and also the issue of the principled reuse of pre-existing resources, such as a lexicon, an ontology, and an English generation module, among others, made possible by the fact that the client MT system is developed for a single target language.