Today(Sep. 18 2009) the word “cattle class” is the most famous compound or multi-word expression(MWE) in India. The word opened a lot of controversies in Indian Politics. I am not interested in the political discussion of the topic. Being Computational Linguists by profession I am interested on the unit “cattle class”.

The word “cattle class” is a MWE . So what is an MWE ? . “A multiword expression (MWE) is a lexeme made up of a sequence of two or more lexemes that has properties that are not predictable from the properties of the individual lexemes or their normal mode of combination.”(Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiword_expression). In Machine Translation MWE is one of the bottle neck. For example if the unit “mango tree” is translated as “mAffA marM”(മാങ്ങാ മരം) in Malayalam, it will be considered as a bad translation. The meaning of the total unit cant be the meaning of its components. If we interpret or explain the unit with its components that can be considered as misinterpretation.

In terms of Indian Language grammar these types of word units(MWE) can be called as ‘samasa’(समासः) or compound. If we observe in our language we can find out so many MWEs in our language as well as in English.Like Indian bread mobile phone mango tree toddy tapper etc……

MWEs are not only an issue in MT but also in human translation. Example is the recent “cattle class” case. If a translator or interpreter is not approaching the problem of language translation with sufficient knowledge of logical structure of language meaning, it can fire-out n issues. Interestingly the issue of understanding meaning from an utterance was deeply studied by Logicians in ancient India. They called the it as “sAbdabOdha”(शाब्दबोधः) , verbal cognition.

Anyhow we started with “cattle class”, what does it really means. I found a link from wikipedia regarding the word. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_class . To this page “cattle class” means economy class in plains or trains. But wikipedia says that the article needs verification(The article appeared somewhere in 2008 in wikipedia). Anyhow what I assumes that the word “cattle class” will be getting the position of a synonym for ‘economy class’. May be we can say that it happened. Anyhow we interpreted it !!!!

Finally MWEs are one of the hottest research topic in Natural Language Processing.(e.g mwe.stanford.edu) A science for to study how to handle words like “cattle class” properly.

Even a corpus linguist can investigate the collocation probability or mutual info rate of the term “cattle class” in large English corpus (concordance extraction can revel the usage context too). From your controversy our research starts!!!!!!

Links pints to meaning of “cattle class”

http://livestock.colostate.edu/youth/judging/index.html

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_class

www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cattle+class

http://www.openwriting.com/archives/2008/02/penned_up_in_ca_1.php

http://travel.ciao.co.uk/Economy_Class__Review_5124862

Note :- I am not criticising or justifying anybody. Please avoid misinterpretation of this writing.

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