Automatic Rewriting of English Deverbal Noun Phrases to Generate More Natural Translations by English-to-Japanese MT Systems

Abstract

One of the major factors causing unnatural translation in English-to-Japanese MT systems is the literal translation of verb-derived nominal constructions. This paper shows a method of automatically rewriting the nominalization (the packed form) into the one less packed, leading to the generation of a more natural and suitable Japanese. We have carried out an experiment mainly centered upon nominal constructions where the head deverbal noun is pre-modified by a genitive noun and postmodified by an “of” prepositional phrase. Having combined the proposed method with our system Power E/J, we found that the method improved the quality of translation for 33 out of the tested 49 sentences (67.3%) which include the rewritten constructions. In previously proposed methods, measures against the unnaturalness have often been taken at the transfer stage embedded in the systems. The advantage of our method over the previous approach is that it is applicable not only to our MT system but also to several other systems. An experiment with commercial MT systems other than ours shows that the incorporation of the pre-editing module has satisfactorily improved the quality of translations in two out of the three systems.