Abstract
In this treatise we set out to describe the linguistic expertise (dictionary and rules) embodied in the Japanese-to-English MT system TWINTRAN, and the evaluation of the translation results. TWINTRAN is based on the following design policy: 1) The translation equivalents and the direction of the translation process are strictly monodirectional, from Japanese to English. The analysis of the Japanese input is not confined to Japanese grammar but also anticipates at every step the possible English translation. 2) Disambiguation is based on prioritisation of each rule, where each rule contains a priority value and the highest aggregate priority candidate is selected. 3) Verb complements are screened for acceptability not only in the input Japanese but also in the output English, and anaphora resolution is used for arriving at the optimum result.
In the window test we have carried out, based on NTT's functional MT test set, applying our evaluation procedure, 73.1% of the corpus was acceptable and the corpus average was above the point of acceptability.
