Akio Yokoo

A system of verbal semantic attributes focused on the syntactic correspondence between Japanese and English

This paper proposes a system of 97 verbal semantic attributes for Japanese verbs which considers both dynamic characteristics and the relationship of verbs to cases. These attribute values are used to disambiguate the meanings of all Japanese and English pattern pairs in a Japanese to English transfer pattern dictionary consisting of 15,000 pairs of Japanese valence patterns and equivalent English syntactic structures.

Automatic Aquisition of Semantic Attributes for User Defined Words m Japanese to English Machine Translation

This paper proposes a method that automatically acquires the SAs (semantic attributes) of user defined words. Applying this method to the compilation of a user dictionary targeting newspaper article sentences and sentences of software design documents has revealed that the automatically determined SAs include 50 to 80% of the correct attributes. Translation experiments confirmed that the automatically acquired SAs improved translation quality by 6-13%.