ENGLISH-JAPANESE TRANSLATION THROUGH CASE-STRUCTURE CONVERSION
Fujio Nishida, Shinobu Takamatsu and Hiroaki Kuroki
Department of Electrical Engineering,
Faculty of Engineering, University of Osaka Prefecture,
Sakai, Osaka, 591 JAPAN
This paper reports some trials on mechanical
translation from English to Japanese through a
case structure constructed on Hornby~s verb patt-
erns. Though the general theoryof case structures
is still at the beginning of study, it provides
partial sentential patterns with rough but reso-
nable classification labels. After determination
of schematic dependency relations, multi-vocal
problems for choosing appropriate equivalents are
dissolved using subcategories of terms and cases.
Case structures of English are transformed into
those of Japanese if necessary, and from those ,
Japanese sentences are generated by a Japanese
grammar.
i. Introduction
English and Japanese are fairly different
languages from each other. Accordingly, it will
be necessary to make translation based on a kind
of deep structures of sentences which determines
sentential forms schematically in respective lan-
guages. The case structure used here is a conven-
tional one which is closely related to surface
structures. But it was found that the case stru-
cture is fairly useful by adding some new means
in construction and usage of it.
The parsing for obtaining the case structure
from English sentences is done by category-match-
ing on a fairly precise verb pattern given by A.S.
Hornby. It dissolves most of multi-syntactic and
semantic category problems of words and
phrases, and determines global dependency
relations among constituents of English
sentences.
Subsequently, it determines the app-
ropriate Japanese equivalents and post-
positions among several candidates by
using subcategories of terms and indivi-
dual prepositional words.
The case structure thus obtained con-
taines the modal part which represents
various characteristics of the predicate
part in almost indepen