Abstract
Since the headlines of English news articles have a characteristic style, different from the styles which prevail in ordinary sentences, it is difficult for MT systems to generate high quality translations for headlines. We try to solve this problem by adding to an existing system a preediting module which rewrites the headlines to ordinary expressions. Rewriting of headlines makes it possible to generate better translations which would not otherwise be generated, with little or no changes to the existing parts of the system. While most MT systems would not probably accept, for example, the headline “Sales up sharply in June”, they would be able to generate a satisfactory translation of the expression “Sales were up sharply in June” where the verb “were” has been inserted. Focusing on a conspicuous phenomenon, the absence of a form of the verb of ‘be’, we have described rewriting rules for putting properly the verb‘be’ into the headlines, based on information obtained by morpholexical and rough syntactic analysis. We have incorporated the proposed method into our English-to-Japanese MT system Power E/J, and carried out an experiment with 312 headlines as unknown data. Our method has satisfactorily marked 81.2% recall and 92. 0% precision.
