Abstract
This paper proposes to improve translation quality by using information on dialogue participants that is easily obtained from outside the translation component. If we wish to make a conversation smooth with the dialogue translation system, it is important to use not only linguistic information, which comes from the source language, but also extra-linguistic information, which is shared between the participants of the conversation. We incorporated the participants'social role into transfer rules and dictionary entries. We conducted an experiment with 23 unseen dialogues (344 utterances) using an English-to-Japanese translation. The experiment demonstrated that recall and precision for expressions which should be polite, are 65% and 86%, respectively. Thus, our simple and easy-to-implement method is effective, which is a key technology enabling smooth conversation with a dialogue translation. Additionally, this paper discusses the useful information such as the participants'gender, and how our method could apply information on dialogue participants to other language pairs.
