Báo cáo khoa học: Coding the Russian Alphabet for the Purpose of Mechanical Translation

If we take advantage of our knowledge of the phonological characteristics of Russian and their orthographic representation, it is possible to introduce a number of simple transformations operating on the text at input, the effect of which is to reduce the number of affixes and simplify the morphological analysis.
Nội dung trích xuất từ tài liệu:
Báo cáo khoa học: "Coding the Russian Alphabet for the Purpose of Mechanical Translation" [Mechanical Translation, Vol.7, no.2, August 1963]Coding the Russian Alphabet for the Purpose of Mechanical Translationby John Lyons,† School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London If we take advantage of our knowledge of the phonological characteristics of Russian and their orthographic representation, it is possible to intro- duce a number of simple transformations operating on the text at input, the effect of which is to reduce the number of affixes and simplify the morphological analysis. It is well known that there is in Russian a phonolog- are necessarily either hard or soft. The orthographicalical opposition between palatalized and non-palatalized conventions of Russian reflect this phonological neutral-consonants (or, in the traditional terminology, between ization, although, for historical reasons, they are no“soft” and “hard” consonants). This palatalization is longer in complete accord with contemporary phoneticmarked in the Russian orthography by the use of one realization in their prescription of the particular vowelsof the set of “soft” vowels or by the special “soft sign” permitted after these consonants. A great simplificationaccording to whether the palatalized consonant is fol- is effected in the declensions and conjugations of thoselowed by a vowel or not. This immediately suggests the lexemes whose stems end in one of these consonants ifpossibility of replacing the “soft” vowels by the “soft we introduce the following transformations to operatesign” + the corresponding “hard” vowels. Thus “Я” before the transformations in (1):would be transformed into *ЬА, “Ю” into *ЬУ, etc.1 А → *Я (a) After Ш, Ж, Щ, Ч, Ц;Furthermore, the “soft sign” and the letter Й are incomplementary distribution, the “soft sign” being writ- У → *Юten after a consonant and Й being written after a vowel. (b) Final Ш, Ж, Щ, Ч, Ц → *Ш6, *ЖЬ, etc. (3)They may therefore be regarded as “allographs” of the Ы→ И (c) After Ц; (4)same “grapheme” and represented by the same symbol,Ь. The transformations suggested so far are listed here И → *Ы (d) After К, Г, Х; (5)for convenience: The effect of these transformations will be clear fromЯ → *ЬА Table 2.Е → *ЬО The letter O appears after the letters Ш, Ж, Щ, Ц, ЧЮ → *ЬУ (1) only when the syllable in which it occurs is under stressИ → *Ь Ы and not consistently then (since Е [i.e. Ё] may beЙ → *Ь written). We thus have marked orthographically the distinction between БОЛЬШЕЙ (“greater”) andThe effect of these transformations operating on the text БОЛЬШОЙ (“great”), though in other cases of theseat input is not merely to reduce the number of symbols same words, which differ similarly in stress, the distinc-required by five but, more important, to reveal identi- tion is not marked: cf. БОЛЬШИМ and БОЛЬШИМ.ties in the “hard” and “soft” declensions and conjuga- ...