2006 Volume 13 Issue 2 Pages 145-168
This paper presents a method to translate Japanese nominal modification structure [N1 no N2] on Japanese-Vietnamese machine translation system. As for Japanese, when a noun is modified by another noun, particle [no] is almost always used to link the two nouns together. The employed [no] conveys various dependency of meaning between the two nouns: nominalization of verbial complement, nominalization of adnominal modification of predicative noun, indication of possession or the whole or a portion and so on. As for Vietnamese, based on the semantic relationships between the two nouns, this structure is using various prepositions (σ, có, cua etc.) and divided into many expression forms with different word orders. The almost same problems also happen when Japanese is translated into English (various prepositions (at, in, with etc.) are used).So far there have been quite many researches on [N1 no N2] from the viewpoints of both linguistics and machine translation butthose researches only focused on Japanese-English language pair. With Vietnamese as the target language, this paper can be seen as the first one that tackled this problem on Japanese-Vietnamese machine translation.In this paper, we analyzed the problems of noun modified by other noun in Vietnamese, classified them into 6 types comparing to Japanese [N1 no N2], and proposed translation rules for [N1 no N2] on Japanese-Vietnamese machine translation system.The rules were applied to 270 phrases including the structure [N1 no N2] on our machine translation system jaw/Vietnamese, and our rules achieved about 70% of accuracy. As for methodology to disambiguate the translation of Japanese [N1 no N2], we think that Vietnamese is not much different from English since syntactic and semantic features can be similarly used as clues to disambiguate the translation of this structure. The point is the accumulation of Vietnamese linguistic phenomena and their analysis, as well as the analysis for the corresponding Japanese expressions. This paper is a research on those matters.
