The Automatic Component of the LINGSTAT Machine-Aided Translation System

The Automatic Component of the LINGSTAT Machine-Aided Translation System* Jonathan Yamron, James Cant, Anne Demerits, Tailco Dietzel, and Yoshilco lto Dragon Systems, Inc., 320 Newda Street, Newton, MA 02160 ABSTRACT We present the newest implementation of the LINGSTAT machine-aided translation system. The moat signiflcsat change from earlier versions is a new set of modules that pro- duce a draft translation of the document for the user to refer to or modify. This paper describes these modules, with spe- cial emphasis on an automatically trained lexicalized gram- mar used in the parsing module. Some preHminary results from the January 1994 ARPA evaluation are reported. 1. INTRODUCTION LINGSTAT is an interactive machine-aided translation system designed to increase the productivity of a trans- lator. It is aimed both at experienced users whose goal is high quality tr~nAlation, and inexperienced users with little knowledge of the source whose goal is simply to ex- tract information from foreign language text. (For an in- troduction to the basic structure of LINGSTAT, see [1].) The first problem to be studied is Japanese to English translation with an emphasis on text from the domain of mergers and acquisitions, although recent evaluations have included general newspaper text as well. Work is also progressing on a Spanish to English system. The approach described below represents the current state of the Japanese system, and will be applied with minimal changes to Spanish. Due to the special difficulties presented by the Japanese writing system, previous versions of LINGSTAT have focused on developing tools for the lexical analysis of Japanese (such as tokenization of the Japanese character stream, morphological analysis, and kat~l~a transliter- ation), and on providing the user access to lexical infor- mation (such as pronunciations, glosses, and definitions) via online lookup tools. In addition, a simple parser was incorporated to identify modifying phrases. No trans- lation of the document was provided. Instead, the user used the results of the above analyses and the online tools to construct a translation. In the newest version of LINGSTAT, the user is pro- *This work was sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract number J-FBI-91-239. vided with a draft translation of the source document. For a source language similar to English, a starting point for such a draft might be a word-for-word translation, but because Japanese word order and sentence structure are so different from English, a more general framework has been constructed. The translation process in LING- STAT consists of the following steps: • Tokenization and morphological analysis • Parsing • Rearrangement of the source into English order • Annotation and selection of glosses via an English language model These modules are described in Section 2 below. Sec- tion 3 gives some preliminary results from the January 1994 evaluation, and Section 4 discusses some plans for future improvements. 2. IMPLEMENTATION Tokenization/de-inflection In LINGSTAT, "tokenization" refers to the process of breaking a source document into a sequence of root words tagged, if necessary, with inflection information. For most languages, the tokenizer is basically …

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