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# Not an Interlingua, But Close: Comparison of English AMRs to Chinese and Czech

**Authors:** [Nianwen Xue](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/nianwen-xue/), [Ondřej Bojar](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/ondrej-bojar/), [Jan Hajič](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/jan-hajic/), [Martha Palmer](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/martha-palmer/), [Zdeňka Urešová](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/zdenka-uresova/), [Xiuhong Zhang](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/xiuhong-zhang/) · **Year:** 2014 · **Venue:** Proceedings of LREC 2014 **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L14-1332](https://aclanthology.org/L14-1332/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) — summary only

[**45** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/xue-2014-not-interlingua-but-close-comparison/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L14-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L14-1332/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L14-1332.pdf)

**Authors (6)**

1. Nianwen Xue
2. Ondřej Bojar
3. Jan Hajič
4. Martha Palmer
5. Zdeňka Urešová
6. Xiuhong Zhang

Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The authors take 100 English sentences that already have AMR graphs, translate them into Chinese and Czech, and write AMR graphs for the translations. The question is whether AMR could serve as a minimally divergent transfer layer in machine translation. The comparison is manual and qualitative. English–Chinese graphs are more compatible than English–Czech ones. For Czech, only 29 of the 100 sentences have structurally identical graphs (apart from argument labels), and 18 more differ only locally, so more than half differ in a deeper way. Causes include multiword expressions that are one concept in one language and several in another, and language-specific concept inventories that do not line up. The conclusion is that AMR is close to an interlingua for some language pairs but not for all, and its guidelines need refinement.

## Ideas

- I1. Compatibility count per author pair: for each verse, check whether two translations give identical meta-trees (same concepts and relations), and report the share. The Czech figures (29 identical, 18 local) are a template for a control table in `measure.rs`. Compare KJV with WEB and KJV with JPS, to test whether close authors are more compatible.
- I2. Treat a multiword phrase that is one concept in one translation and two in another as a phrase node with its own identifier. Test the reader on the verses where this happens.
- I3. Keep each author's concept inventory separate and map it to shared identifiers only through the lexicon, so that an unaligned inventory does not leak into the meta-world.

## For Mova

The code is `tools/translate/meta.rs` and `measure.rs`. I1 gives the Bible pairs a measure that is comparable to the paper's, and I2 addresses open problem 2 (phrases that carry function words). The paper's Chinese pair is closer than its Czech pair; the same pattern is worth checking for Mova's author pairs.

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.

```
@inproceedings{xue2014not,
  title = {{Not an Interlingua, But Close: Comparison of English AMRs to Chinese and Czech}},
  author = {Xue, Nianwen and Bojar, Ondřej and Hajič, Jan and Palmer, Martha and Urešová, Zdeňka and Zhang, Xiuhong},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)},
  year = {2014},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/L14-1332/}
}
```

- [← previous Incorporate Semantic Structures into Machine Translation Evaluation via UCCA](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/xu-2020-incorporate-semantic-structures-into-machine/)
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