Jung In Kim, Kyong Hi Moon, Jong Hyeok Lee

The KIPS Transactions:PartB , Vol. 8, No. 6, pp. 685-692, Dec. 2001
10.3745/KIPSTB.2001.8.6.685,   PDF Download:

Abstract

This paper describes how to disambiguate the aspectual meaning of Japanese expression ´-te iru´ in Japanese-Korean machine translation. Due to grammatical similarities of both languages, almost all Japanese-Korean MT systems have been developed under the direct MT strategy, in which the lexical disambiguation is essential to high-quality translation. Japanese has a progressive aspectual marker ´-te iru´ which is difficult to translate into Korean equivalents because in Korean there are two different progressive aspectual markers : ´-ko issta´ for ´action progressive´ and ´-e issta´ for ´state progressive´. Moreover, the aspectual system of both languages does not quite coincide with each other, so the Korean progressive aspect could not be determined by Japanese meaning of ´-te iru´ alone. The progressive aspectual meaning may be partially determined by the meaning of predicates and also the semantic meaning of predicates may be partially restricted by adverbials, so all Japanese predicates are classified into five classes : the 1st verb is used only for ´action progressive´, 2nd verb generally for ´action progressive´, but occasionally for ´state progressive´, the 3rd verb only for ´state progressive´, the 4th verb generally for ´state progressive´, but occasionally for ´action progressive´, and the 5th verb for the others. Some heuristic rules are defined for disambiguation of the 2nd and 4th verbs on the basis of abverbs and abverbial phrases. In an experimental evaluation using more than 15,000 sentances from ´Asahi newspapers´, the proposed method improved the translation quality by about 5%, which proves that it is effective in disambiguating ´-te iru´ for Japanese-Korean machine translation.

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