Abstract
Words such as “mo”, “sae” and “demo” are particular function words in Japanese, and are known as “toritate” words. They have a variety of syntactic and semantic uses, and complicated corresponding relations to Chinese leads to ambiguities in Japanese-Chinese machine translation. Thus the use of current commercially available machine translation software results in numerous mistranslations of these words, in terms of vocabulary selected and word order determination.
In this paper, we propose a method for disambiguating the meaning of expressions containing the “toritate” words “mo”, “sae” and “demo” by referring to the following syntactic and semantic features: (1) the features of the scope of the “toritate” word (it may be NP or VP), (2) the features of the predicate that are related to the “toritate” word, and (3) the features of the corresponding Chinese word for the Japanese scope of the “toritate” word. The positions of these “toritate” words in Chinese are determined according to their syntactic rules as well as the grammatical role of the scope of the “toritate” words in Chinese.
We evaluated our translation algorithm manually using 100 example sentences each for “mo”, “sae” and “demo”. The translation accuracy for each of these words was over 80%, indicating that our method provides a more accurate Japanese-Chinese translation than currently commercially available translation software.
