Machine Translation by Contextual/Discourse Information Processing

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Cross Lingual INformation Translator

Internet brings a new era for Machine Translation. The need for Machine Translation becomes high and high for international information exchange via Internet. However, unfortunately, current machine translation technology is not well developed for such purposes. Thus we need some new investigations which enables us to develop richly talented machine translation systems. We are studing machine translation which processes contextual/discourse information in order to resolve linguistic ambiguity problems.

Many Asian languages differ from European languages and need to apply contextual/discourse information processing. Thai language is a typical example invoking such requirement. We are studying machine translation between Thai and Japanese languages. We also concern translation to/from English by which we try to evaluate our appraoches.

Thai language as well as Japanese has no word delimiter. Additionally Thai language uses no sentence delimiter. Thai words have no inflections. Thai sentences have no tense expretion. Thai language uses a lot of linguistic component eliminations. These facts make us easy understand that we need contextual/discourse information processing for Thai language processing thus translation to/from Thai language.

We have already developed a naive Thai contextual grammar and then implemented it on CAT2 (Eurotra Machine Translation System) for Thai sentence analysis. We have also developed a small machine translation system from Japanese to Thai based on an investigation that there are clear similality on elimination between Thai and Japanese. Thus this machine translation system transforms Japanese sentences into Thai sentences preserving ambiguities coming from the eliminations.

Our Web can display only European alphabets and Japanese letters thus cannot manipulate Thai characters. Thus we cannot demonstrate our machine translation system on this Web at a momemnt.

Currently we have developed CLINT experimental systems. One is CLINT-J2T , a translation system from Japanese to Thai, and the other is CLINT-J2M , a translation system from Japanese to Maly.

We have started a new study of CLINT-JEC , a translation system among Japanese, English, and Chinese.

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