Patterns of Derivation

Contrary to inection and compounding, derivation is a largely neglected topic in the field of MT. In this paper we stress the importance of morphological and syntactic patterns of derivation, the treatment of which a powerful NLP system, especially if it is MT-oriented, cannot dispense with. It will be shown that the suggested approach of full derivational analysis not only augments the consistency of lexical representations by an overall reduction in the size of monolingual and bilingual lexicons but also opens insight into the semantic nature of different parts of speech. Examples of implementation are taken from the CAT2 MT system as it is currently used in various MT projects funded by the CEC.