Machine translation from japanese into english

Abstract

This paper describes the outline of our Japanese to English machine translation system, which is supported by the Agency of Science and Technology of the Japanese Government. Many new methodologies are introduced to obtain high-quality translation results. The analysis is based on case grammar, which is suitable for a word-order-free language such as Japanese. The dictionary is rich enough to handle many specific expressions. It contains not only case frame information, but also semantic information, idiomatic expressions, and many others. In the transfer phase, the system applies many structural transformations, so that the structural difference of the same contents in Japanese and English can be relieved. In the generation phase, many structural transformations are again applied so that the ellipsis problems can be avoided, and that better stylistic expressions can be obtained. The system is running mainly for the abstracts of scientific and technical papers. The evaluation method of the translated results is also discussed, with many example translations.