Though most translation systems have some mechanism for translating certain types of divergent predicate-argument structures, they do not provide a genera] procedure that takes advantage of the relationship between lexical-semantic structure and syntactic structure. A divergent predicate-argument structure is one in which the predicate (e.g., the main verb) or its arguments (e.g., the subject and object) do not have the same syntactic ordering properties for both the source and target language. To account for such ordering differences, a machine translator must consider language-specific syntactic idiosyncrasies that distinguish a target language
Bonnie J. Dorr