Machine translation (MT) has recently been formulated in terms of constraint-based knowledge representation and unification theories~ but it is becoming more and more evident that it is not possible to design a practical M T system without an adequate method of handling mismatches between semantic representations in the source and target languages. In this paper, we introduce the idea of "information-based" MT, which is considerably more flexible than interlingual MT or the conventional transfer-based MT. Introduction With the intensive exploration of contemporary theories on unification grammars[6, 15, 13] and feature structures[7, 19] in the last decade, the old image.
