Representation and Recognition Method for Multi-Word Translation Units in Korean-to-Japanese MT System

Abstract

Due to grammatical similarities, even a one-to-one mapping between Korean and Japanese words (or morphemes) can usually result in a high quality Korean-to-Japanese machine translation. However, multi-word translation units (MWTU) such as idioms, compound words, etc., need an n-to-m mapping, and their component words often do not appear adjacently, resulting in a discontinuous MWTU. During translation, the MWTU should be treated as one lexical item rather than a phrase. In this paper, we define the types of MWTUs and propose their representation and recognition method depending on their characteristics in Korean-to-Japanese MT system. In an experimental evaluation, the proposed method turned out to be very effective in handling MWTUs, showing an average recognition accuracy of 98.4% and a fast recognition time.