  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 MT
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.
