LINGSTAT: An Interactive, Machine-Aided Translation System

LINGSTAT: AN INTERACTIVE, MACHINE-AIDED TRANSLATION SYSTEM* Jonathan Yamron, James Baker, Paul Bamberg, Haakon Chevalier, Taiko Dietzel, John Elder, Frank Kampmann, Mark Mandel, Linda Manganaro, Todd Margolis, and Elizabeth Steele Dragon Systems, Inc., 320 Nevada Street, Newton, MA 02160 ABSTRACT In this paper we present the first implementation of LING- STAT, an interactive machine translation system designed to increase the productivity of a user, with little knowledge of the source language, in translating or extracting information from foreign language documents. In its final form, LING- STAT will make use of statistical information gathered from parallel and single-language corpora, and linguistic informa- tion at all levels (lexical, syntactic, and semantic). 1. INTRODUCTION The DARPA initiative in machine translation supports three very different avenues of research, including CAN- DIDE's fully automatic system [1,2], the interactive, knowledge-based system of the PANGLOSS group [3-6], and LINGSTAT, also an interactive system. LING- STAT, as its name implies, incorporates both linguistic and statistical knowledge representations. It is intended for users who are native speakers of the target language, and is designed to be useful to those with little knowledge of the source (by providing access to foreign language documents), as well as those with a greater knowledge of the source (by improving productivity in translation). Although a future implementation will suggest transla- tions of phrases and sentences, high quality automatic translation is not a goal; LINGSTAT's purpose is to re- lieve users of the most tedious and difficult translation tasks, but may well leave problems that the user is better suited to solve. Initial efforts have been focused on the translation of Japanese to English in the domain of mergers and acqui- sitions, and a first version of a translator's workstation has been assembled. Work has also begun on a Span- ish version of the system. As resources become avail- able, particularly parallel corpora, the Spanish system will be further developed and work will be extended to include other European languages. This paper describes the Japanese system. Japanese poses special challenges in translation that are not seen in European languages. The most striking are *This work was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract number J-FBI-91-239. that Japanese text is not divided into words, and that the number of writing symbols is very large. These sym- bols can be divided into at least four sets: kanji, hira- gana, katakana, and, occasionally, the Latin alphabet. The general-use kanji number about 2000. They are not phonetic symbols (most have several pronunciations, de- pending on context), but carry meaning and often ap- pear two or three to a word. Hiragana and katakana, on the other hand, are phonetic alphabets; hiragana is usu- ally used for important function words in Japanese gram- mar (sentence particles, auxiliary verbs) and to indicate inflection of verbs, adjectives, and nouns, while katakana is used almost exclusively for borrowed foreign words. Another difficulty of Japanese is that it lacks many gram- matical features taken for granted in English, such as plurals, articles, routine …

Content truncated to 500 words