A Translation Method of Negative Sentence in Japanese-Chinese Machine Translation

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for translating negative sentence in Japanese-Chinese MT. Japanese has a basic negative particle (nai), which always agglutinates the predicate. While in Chinese, several adverbs such as (bu), (mei), (bie) are used for expressing negation, which may appear in various places of the sentence according to the negative focus and syntax. Thus the selection of Chinese negatives and the position of Chinese negatives becometwo problems to be solved in Japanese-Chinese MT. In the Japanese-Chinese MT system named jaw/Chinese which we are developing, negative sentence will be translated in two processes. The basic proposition content is translated based on a pattem transfer method, and the negative particle is translated by using the selection rule and the position rule of Chinese negative particles. We construct these two rules by using: (1) The syntactic features of Japanese and Chinese sentence (2) The attributes of the predicate and its modifiers (adverbial modifier and complement) in Chinese.(3) The syntactic features of the negative focus in Japanese. The analysis about the relation between negative focus and the position of Chinese negative particles is an important point for making the position rule. We evaluated our translation algorithm manually using 113 negative sentences which extracted from about 1000 sentences, and got a translation accuracy of about 94%.