Shinichiro Kamei

An Interactive Translation Support Facility for Non-Professional Users

We present an interactive translation method to support non-professional users to write an original document. The method, combining dictionary lookup function and user-guided stepwise interactive machine translation, allows the user to obtain clear result with an easy operation. We implemented the method as an English writing support facility that serves as a translation support front-end to an arbitrary application.

A Text Input Front-end Processor as an Information Access Platform

This paper presents a practical foreign language writing support tool which makes it much easier to utilize dictionary and example sentence resources. Like a Kana-Kanji conversion front-end processor used to input Japanese language text, this tool is also implemented as a front-end processor and can be combined with a wide variety of applications. A morphological analyzer automatically extracts key words from text as it is being input into the tool, and these words are used to locate information relevant to the input text. This information is then automatically displayed to the user. With this tool, users can concentrate better on their writing because much less interruption of their work is required for the consulting of dictionaries or for the retrieval of reference sentences. Retrieval and display may be conducted in any three ways: 1) relevant information is retrieved and displayed automatically; 2) information is retrieved automatically but displayed only on user command; 3) information is both retrieved and displayed only on user command. The extent to which the retrieval and display of information proceeds automatically depends on the type of information being referenced; this element of the design adds to system efficiency. Further, by combining this tool with a stepped-level interactive machine translation function, we have created a PC support tool to help Japanese people write in English.

Lexical information for determining Japanese unbounded dependency

This paper presents a practical method for a global structure analyzing algorithm of Japanese long sentences with lexical information, a method which we call Lexical Discourse Grammar (LDG). This method assumes that Japanese function words, such as conjunctive particles (postpositions) located at the end of each clause, have modality and suggest global structures of Japanese long sentences in cooperation with modality within predicates or auxiliary verbs. LDG classifies the encapsulating powers of function words into six levels, and modality in predicates into four types. LDG presumes the inter-clausal dependency within Japanese sentences prior to syntactic and semantic analyses, by utilizing the differences of the encapsulating powers each Japanese function word has, and by utilizing modification preference between function words and predicates that reflects consistency of modality in them. In order to confirm the encapsulation power of Japanese function words, we analyzed the speech utterances of a male announcer and found the correlation between a particles encapsulating power and the pause length inserted after the clause with a conjunctive particle.