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# Toward compact monotonically compositional interlingua using lexical aspect

**Authors:** [Bonnie J. Dorr](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/bonnie-j-dorr/), Mari Broman Olsen, Scott C. Thomas · **Year:** 1997 · **Venue:** AMTA/SIG-IL First Workshop on Interlinguas **Link:** [aclanthology.org/1997.mtsummit-workshop.4](https://aclanthology.org/1997.mtsummit-workshop.4/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) — summary only

[**5** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2166763171) openalex · 2026-10-19[**4** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/dorr-1997-compact-monotonically-compositional-interlingua-lexical/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[AMTA/SIG-IL First Workshop on Interlinguas](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/1997.mtsummit-workshop/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/1997.mtsummit-workshop.4/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/1997.mtsummit-workshop.4.pdf)
- [DOI 10.21236/ada458248](https://doi.org/10.21236/ada458248)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2166763171)

**Authors (3)**

1. [Bonnie J. Dorr](https://openalex.org/A5054060679) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4356-5813) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1752326) · h 39 · 8547 citations · 432 works
2. [Mari Broman Olsen](https://openalex.org/A5082291739) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145236520) · h 3 · 140 citations · 5 works
3. [Scott C. Thomas](https://openalex.org/A5030957850) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2109758191) · h 5 · 83 citations · 14 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-19); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The interlingua of the UNITRAN project has 191 main verb classes, 434 subclasses and 237 distinct lexical conceptual structures. The authors ask whether the lexicon can be kept smaller by deriving most entries from a few basic ones. They use a model of lexical aspect in which features are privative and only added, never removed: a state can become an activity by gaining a dynamic feature, and an activity can become an accomplishment by gaining a telic feature. Seventy-one aspectually basic subclasses are linked to 68 non-basic ones through type-shifting rules. The result is claimed to give a more compact lexicon and a refinement of Levin's verb classes. The paper reports the counts of classes and the rule types, with no task measurement.

## Ideas

- I1. Derive variants by rule instead of storing them. In `tools/translate` (`meta.rs`), keep only the basic concept for a verb class and generate its aspectual variants from a short rule list. Report how many stored concepts this removes and whether the exact-match count on the dev verses stays the same.
- I2. Put a privative aspect feature on each meta token, taken from its frame: a state, activity or accomplishment marker, added only when the frame shows the feature. The feature is a count from data, and it gives the encoder a constraint without a new concept.
- I3. Block merges across aspect classes. Some of today's noisy merges may join a state with an event (open problem 2 lists *be* with *have* and *do* with *know*). Count how many current merges cross a class, then test the block with a negative control that merges random pairs.

## For Mova

The paper gives the aspect side of the meta-world. The code is `tools/translate` (`meta.rs`, `profile.rs`) and the frames in `prag` and `tools/roundtrip`. The first measure is the count of merges that cross aspect classes in the current lexicon, run twice to check identical output. Nothing here is a claim about Mova yet.

Topics: [Machine translation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/machine-translation/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.21236/ada458248](https://doi.org/10.21236/ada458248)

```
@inproceedings{dorr1997toward,
  title = {{Toward compact monotonically compositional interlingua using lexical aspect}},
  author = {Dorr, Bonnie J. and Olsen, Mari Broman and Thomas, Scott C.},
  booktitle = {AMTA/SIG-IL First Workshop on Interlinguas},
  year = {1997},
  doi = {10.21236/ada458248},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.21236/ada458248}
}
```

- [← previous Machine Translation Divergences: A Formal Description and Proposed Solution](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/dorr-1994-machine-translation-divergences-formal-description/)
- [next → Essays of John Dryden (ed. W. P. Ker): the Preface to Ovid's Epistles (1680) and the Dedication of the Aeneis (1697)](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/dryden-1900-essays-john-dryden/)
- [↑ back to Machine translation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/mtrans/)

## References

24 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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