Generation of Korean Predicates Based on Modality-Feature Ordering and Lexicalizing Table in Japanese-Korean Machine Translation

Abstract

Both Korean and Japanese share many grammatical characteristics including the same word order, so that almost all Japanese-to-Korean machine translation systems would have adopted the direct translation strategy to take advantage of the similarities. Even in the direct translation for the very similar language pair, however there are still a lot of problems that have to be solved for high-quality translation. Out of them we only focus on the predicate translation, whose difficulty is caused not only by complex conjugation but also by the inconsistent syntactic category and the different relative order of modal expressions between two languages. To solve the difficulty, we propose a table-driven predicate generation in which a modalityfeature ordering and Lexicalizing table (called MFOLT) plays an important role to map Japanese predicates into their Korean equivalents via abstract pivot of symbolic modality features. Experimental evaluation was done with 2, 338 sentences extracted from Asahi newspaper and some Japanese grammar books, which turned out that the proposed method would make a good effect on predicate translation, showing the success rate of 97.5%.