Abstract
As a means of allowing for robust processing of such linguistic phenomena as inversion, ellipsis, parenthesis and emphasis, which are liable to prevent a syntactic parser from generating appropriate syntactic structures, this paper shows a method of automatically preediting sentences, based on information obtained by morpholexical and simple syntactic analysis. Addition of a preediting module to the existing system makes it possible 1) to generate better translations, which would not otherwise be generated, with little or no changes to the existing parts of the system, and 2) to reduce the load of syntactic analysis, thus enhancing the efficiency of the whole system. We have incorporated the proposed method into our English-to-Japanese machine translation system Power E/J, and carried out an experiment with sentences in news wire articles. The incorporation of the preediting module has satisfactorily 1) improved the quality of translations for the 260 sentences out of rewritten 330 ones (78.8%), and 2) marked up the speed of 1.12 times as fast as the system without the module.
