Journal of Natural Language Processing
Online ISSN : 2185-8314
Print ISSN : 1340-7619
ISSN-L : 1340-7619
Improvement of Translation Quality of Pronouns in an English-to-Japanese MT System
TAKEHIKO YOSHIMI
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2001 Volume 8 Issue 3 Pages 87-106

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Abstract
In order to translate sentences of English containing pronouns into natural and suitable Japanese, it is frequently necessary either to eliminate pronouns or to turn them into some other expressions. As for eliminating unwanted pronouns, a set of manually-written rules has already been presented. In this article we propose to 1) offer a way of substituting unwanted pronouns for other expressions as well as eliminating them, and 2) use a decision tree learning algorithm to learn rules automatically from a corpus, without requiring human intervention. The features used for learning are selected from the linguistic constraints we have so far understood which apply on zero pronominalisation, and from the clues which have been used for anaphora resolution of zero pronouns in the engineering studies. Having applied the proposed method to the translation results of our English-to-Japanese machine translation system Power E/J, we found that in the cases where the judgement whether zero pronominalisation should be applied the accuracy of translation was 79.9%, where in addition to the above judgement the substitution of pronouns for other expressions was applied the accuracy was 72.2%. These results are well comparable with those obtained by hand-written rules. It also became clear that none of the selected features lowers the accuracy, which means we can use as features for our purpose not only the linguistic constraints on zero pronominalisation but also the clues for restoring zero pronouns.
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