An Interactive Rewriting Tool for Machine Acceptable Sentences

An Interactive Rewriting Tool for Machine Acceptable Sentences Hideki Hirakawa*, Kouichi Nomura**, Mariko Nakamura** * Toshiba Corporation, R&D Center ** Toshiba Corporation, Tokyo System Center 1, Komukaitoshiba-cho, Saiwai-kn, 3-22, Kata-machi, Fuchuu, Kawasaki 210, Japan Tokyo 183, Japan hirakawa@islxde.toshiba.co.jp { nomura, marl }@docs.sc.fuchu.toshiba.co.jp Abstract This paper proposes an interactive rewriting tool for supporting people in creating machine acceptable sentences. The experiment and evaluation of this tool conducted when applied to a pre-editing support tool in a Japanese-to-English machine translation (henceforth, MT) system are also described. 1. Introduction Supporting people in creating machine acceptable sentences is one important issue of future NL~ appli- cations. Agents in computers will be able to provide people with a variety of services by grasping the con- tents of documents. An intelligent mail server, for example, can read mails and send appropriate replies semi or fully automatically if the mails are machine acceptable. This is a natural extension of the ideas explored in the object lens(Malone, Grant, Lai, Rao and Rosenblitt, 1986). However, it is difficult for humans to write in machine acceptable forms because of gaps between humans and machines. First, hnmans use semantics, context and common sense in interpreting a sentence, while limited resources are available to machines. Sec- ond, unlike machines, humans cannot simulate sentence analysis proce~ in a machine to check all pos- sibilities. As such, man-machine corporation would be one solution with the least burdens on humans. Prior to a general-purpose rewriting tool, we have been developing a pre-editing support tool for an MT system(Hirakawa,Nogami and Amano,1991). Since our central concern is to analyze human-computer interaction for creating machine acceptable sentences, MT systems for bilingmd and monolingnal users are closely related to our tool. Considering that the dif- ficulty of interactive systems lies in "so many interactions for a single sentence,"(Hutehins and Somers, 1992) we need a framework which produces the best result with least interactions. 2. Interactive Rewriting Tool 2.1 Design Principles The problems of rewriting include difficulties in learning its know-how and unpredictable effects of rewriting. The following are our design principles: 1) Interaction-based system: Since rewriting is a dynamic process, the process should be interactive to deal with changes. 2) Presentation of rewriting candidates: The system should present possible recommended revisions to users so that they can select the best choice and guar- antee the correctness of the rewriting. 3) Minimization of interactions: To minimize fre- quencies of interactions in rewri6ng, the system should fully utilize knowledge available to improve the accuracy of the diagnoses. 4) Optimization of interactions: Scales to measure the degree of rewriting(scalability) should be introduced to optimize interactions to obtain the maximum effects with minimum interactions. 2.2 System Configuration The system consists of two main parts: a sentence checker and a user interface unit The sentence checker is composed of a sentence ana- lyzer, an information extractor and a rewriting candidate generator. The information extractor extracts the information necessary for rewriting, such as morphological and syntactic information, from the analysis results of an NIT system, …

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