Abstract
Many Japanese sentence segmentation algorithms have been proposed to translate Japanese into English or to query databases. Those methods use a huge dictionary including word representation, readings, and grammar references which require considerable time and work. Since Braille needs only blanks and phonetic information, we do not have to check grammatical combination of words. We propose a new system to segment the Japanese sentence in order to translate Japanese into Braille. Our methods uses a knowledge base which categorizes Japanese sentence segmentation rules. Segmentation rules for translating into Braille are heuristic, ambiguous and complicated. Software is available but the user interface is not very good and volunteers rarely use it. So we provide a user interface for checking the position of ambiguous segmentation. In this way, the users'workload is reduced since it is no longer necessary to check all parts of the sentences. In our method, only a few small tables including words with the segmentation patterns are necessary. Our knowledge base does not need any grammatical information, but utilizes surface information such as Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, and other character types. The accuracy of segmentaion is 98.0%-a higher rate than that found in usual methods.
