Towards Machine Translation Using Contextual Information

Towards Machine ]ranslal; on U. inf C, onC(,×t, m,1 hfforma,tion Tim Cornish, Kimikazu ]"ujita, [lyochi ,~uginm,'~ { ti,n,fujil, a,sugimura }((fisl.mei.co.jl) M;~tsushit, a. l';lectric Industrial Co I,td Information ~md Commu' nmaLl()~' ' is Technology lmbora.tory Abstract A proposal is made for the use of contextual in- formation in the machine translation of Japanese and English. This paper describes the use of a Context Monitor to nlaintaill contextual infortmt- tion dyn,'unically and the ~tugmenlalion of appro- priate features to ~t semantic network to enahh~ simple inference. The al}proach taken is that {}t" "best gucs~?' processing with the cont~extual infor- mation being hal~dled with semantic inf{~rmalion on ~ shallow level. 2 Introduction Current Machine qh'anslatiou (MT) systems proc,~ss input sentence by sentence. I[owever, experience wil.h English and Japanese has shown that some languages difl'er to such a degree that sentential translation yiehls poor results, l,eL us first compare the results of a conventional MT sysl.em with those we expect, t,o get for MT with context: t. J::q'lJf]~-._-i~¢{:¢/,?)[ b v,-)-- 1/~3-'.~E~gfi £" 2)i L v, K 2. K-7: ~t- laJaS'd?,l~ ~a ~t~.I;~y b t:: o 4. k-c g ];! ( 5'~ko This might be translated by a current, machine tl'ans- lation system as shown in Figure 11: It can clearly l)e seen that meaning in IHally seI/- tenees is obscured. Let us compare this with I.he re- suits of a system using simple cont.exl.ual informal,ion ms shown in Figure 2: This secol/d translation is i-tlllch Ill(H'(? CO]lO['{~ll{. ;IH{I better preserves the meaning of the original se,lten{'o. An attempt has therefore I}een made to solve some of tile problems of translal.ing languages SllCIt sis Japanese and English using contextual information. Due to [.he consideral.ions of wanting to produce a high quality small-sized MT system, lhe approach taken is to use tile resources awdlahle in an exisl;ing MT system and to process the contextu;d i,l['orlmd.ion l There is obviously n great difference in results Imtweet, sys- tems, hnl, l.hese translat.icms relweSent tyl}iCal {uHe, llted) r~.stdts fi'om a numher of systems, a) and I}) options,hq}end on the default settings of individual systems 1. The Chief I)evel{}pment li;ngineer develot}ed two new TV models and Four new video ,nod- els last year. 2. a) A vi{h'o was shil)ped to the Sales Section. b) We/Soineone shil)pcd a video to the Sales See- l, ion. "I. a) 'l'wo models were released straight away. l}) \\/e/~olneone released I,wo models straight a*,v a.g. d. It sohl very well. Figure 1: (jonventional M'P Results I. The Chief l)evelolmmnt Engineer developed DA'O IICW 'FV lllodels ~llld [()sir flew video n/ori- els lasl year. 2. lie shipped the videos l.o t.he Sales Section. 3. They released two models straight away. 4. Tlmy sold very well. Figure. 2: Coutext, ual M'[' Kesults on a shallow level only, using the information gained to guide the translation on a "best guess" basis. This kiml of feal,ure with rat.her light; processing for the production of a higher quality translation is desirable in a pracl,ical MT system because the advanl.ages of …

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