Automatic aquisition of semantic attributes for user defined words in 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 ofsoftware 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%. 1. Introduct ion When working with a MT(machine translation) system, users compile user dictionaries for the words which are not registered in the system dictionaries or for those with inappropriate ranslations [1]. But when registering new words in a dictionary, there is a need to give not just the index word and translated word, but also syntactic, semantic and various other information. Systems aiming at higher levels of translation quality require more detailed and accurate information [2,3], and it is no simple task for laymen to give such information. In particular, semantic information usually requires the skill of professionals. In this paper, attention has been focused on the characteristics of user defined words. A method is proposed where for index words (noun words or compound nouns) in the original language that users eek to register, one need give only the translation i the target language to permit he system apply the knowledge held in the system dictionaries, automatically judge the type of noun and determine the SAs of the word for the noun types. 2. System Dictionaries and User Dictionaries 2.1 Semant ic Dict ionaries in ALT- J /E Here, we shall refer to the dictionary prepared in advance by the MT system as a system dictionary and the dictionary prepared and used by users as a user dictionary