ALTFLASH: a Japanese-to-English machine translation system for market flash reports

MT Summit VII Sept. 1999 ALTFLASH: A Japanese-to-English Machine Translation System for Market Flash Reports Hajime Uchino Yoshifumi Ooyama Osamu Furuse NTT Cyber Solutions NTT Communication Science NTT Cyber Solutions Laboratories Laboratories Laboratories uchino@soy.kecl.ntt.co.jp ooyama@cslab.kecl.ntt.co.jp furuse@soy.kecl.ntt.co.jp Abstract We have developed a Japanese-to-English machine translation system for market flash reports called ALTFLASH. ALTFLASH is a hybrid translation system based on a combination of rule-based translation and template-based translation systems. The experimental results were that the system could achieve good translation for 90% of source sentences (70% of articles) in reports on the foreign section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. In addition, we focused on account settlement flashes, which formed fixed patterns, and developed a new system to translate them. This system has been installed, by Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei) in March 1998 in their English translation service for news flashes on settlements of accounts. It is a fully automatic translation system that enables news flashes to be broadcast to the world without requiring human intervention. 1 Introduction Numerous systems and applications of machine translation have been developed. These include successful systems in operational use such as TAUM- METEO, a weather report translation system used by the Canadian Meteorological Centre in Montreal, and SYSTRAN, a large technical document translation system used by the US Air Force and General Motors of Canada. However, there are a lot of technical problems when translating from Japanese to English. Finally machine translation systems came to use for preliminary translation when translating large volumes of documents. We have studied practical machine translation systems for industrial and economic information. In other languages, it exists some systems proposed to translate business news such as a translation system for Wire-Service economic news from English to Japanese (Aizawa 97) and a translation system for business news captions from English to German (Nyberg 97). We have developed a Japanese-to-English multi- engine translation system for market flash reports called ALTFLASH. and confirmed its practicality for Japanese to English translation. And we focused on account settlement flashes, which are basically formed in fixed patterns, and developed a new system to translate them. This system has been installed by Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei) in March 1998, in the English translation service for news flashes on settlements of accounts. This is a fully automatic translation system that enables news flashes to be broadcast to the world without requiring human intervention. This paper describes the characteristics of market flash reports in Section 2, gives an outline of the market flash translation system in Section 3, and provides experimental results along with practical applications of the settlement of accounts flash translation system in Section 4. 2 Characteristics of Market Flash Reports In Market flash reports, there are many expressions that are difficult to translate with a conventional machine translation system. Such expressions include technical terms or domain-specific expressions. Furthermore, similar expressions are used often. With these factors in mind, we constructed the translation system. For our experiment, we used articles on the foreign section of the Tokyo Stock …

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