9314583 Dorr This three-year award supports U.S.-France cooperative research in interactive systems (human/computer) between research groups at the the University of Maryland and the University of Narbonne, Toulouse, France. The U.S. investigators are Bonnie Dorr and Martha Palmer, and the French investigator is Patrick Saint-Dizier. They will collaborate on topics concerning lexical representations for French and English. The objective of their research is to develop a conceptual description for thematic roles and argument structures. They will emphasize cross-linguistic distinctions and the meaning components which are necessary for lexical selection during machine translation. Current machine translation systems encounter problems when extended to new languages or domains. This joint project will not only advance our understanding of that problem, but is likely to lead to a new lexical based framework that can be applied to machine translation, information retrieval, and automatic lexical acquisition. The U.S. investigators bring to this collaboration expertise in lexical-semantic representation. This is complemented by Dr. Saint-Dizier's theoretical work in computational linguistics. ***
