Atsushi Okajima

A heuristic approach to English-into-Japanese machine translation

Practical machine translation must be considered from a heuristic point of view rather than from a purely rigid analytical linguistic method. An English-into-Japanese translation system named ATHENE based on a Heuristic Parsing Model (HPM) has been developed. The experiment shows some advantageous points such as simplification of transforming and generating phase, semilocalization of multiple meaning resolution, and extendability for future grammatical refinement. HPM-base parsing process, parsed tree, grammatical data representation, and translation results are also described.

A PROPER TREATMEMT OF SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS IN MACHINE TRANSLATION

A proper treatment of syntax and semantics in machine translation is introduced and discussed from the empirical viewpoint. For English-Japanese machine translation, the syntax directed approach is effective where the Heuristic Parsing Model (HPM) and the Syntactic Role System Play important roles. For Japanese-English translation, the semantics directed approach is powerful where the Conceptual Dependency Diagram (CDD) and the Augmented Case Marker System (which is a kind of Semantic Role System) play essential roles. Some examples of the difference between Japanese sentence structure and English sentence structure, which is vital to machine translation, are also discussed together with various interesting ambiguities.