Machine translation in Korea

MT Summit VII Sept 1999 Machine Translation in Korea Se-Young Park Gil-Rok Oh Electronics and Telecommunications Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute Research Institute Korea Korea Abstract This report introduces the current situation of machine translation in Korea. Recently, the need for further developing machine transla- tion has been generally recognized. Although a few machine translation softwares for Kore- an have been released on the market, they do not sufficiently meet the need of users. As a result, the Korean machine translation field is only a niche market. However, several pro- jects are underway in Korea which include world-wide technical cooperation. This report surveys the history of machine translation in Korea and describes the current market, R&D status, and current technical difficulties. 1 Introduction There are common two responses made when we suggest a project concerning machine translation to information and telecommunication R&D sponsors. First they ask, “Are you still working on a project for machine transla- tion?”. Second, they state “It cannot be done.” There re- sponses are quite natural, because machine translation projects have been carried out for many years, but no quality products have been marketed. However, there have been many erroneous ideas popu- larized about machine translation. There has been no continued and full R&D in machine translation in Korea over the last 10 years. R&D spending clearly reveal this fact. Only inconsequential R&D spending have been in- vested in basic research in spite of significant technical difficulties. As with other countries, Korea has seen a number of technical trials and errors in its machine translation re- search history. Especially, such grammatical theories that are suitable for foreign language but neglect the linguistic characteristics of Korean language have been adopted for use in Korea, with the result that many attempts have been aborted. In the 1980s most research was carried out in grammatical theory. Moving into the 1990s, much con- cern was focused on machine translation based on corpus, but commercial products were developed separately from such research. Furthermore, the technical levels have not yet kept abreast of what is needed by general users. Thanks to the development of the Internet, however, a desire for viewing web pages prepared in foreign lan- guage has grown, and a need for reading captions trans- lated into Korean is increasing as opportunities of ap- proaching foreign broadcasting programs. Such changes highlight the importance of machine translation again. Anyone can easily forecast that this field will bring forth a new market with a great potential even if not an expert in this field. 2 History of machine translation in Korea 2.1 Beginning of Machine Translation Research: Early 1980 The history of machine translation in Korea began with basic research with a small scale of research funds at 3-4 colleges including KAIST in the begin- ning of the 1980s. The research in machine translation during this period was started as part of a new mega- trend named artificial intelligence rather than as the study in machine translation itself. As the machine translation …

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