A method for English-Korean target word selection using multiple knowledge sources

Abstract

Target word selection is one of the most important and difficult tasks in English-Korean Machine Translation. It effects on the overall translation accuracy of machine translation systems. In this paper, we present a new approach to Korean target word selection for an English noun with translation ambiguities using multiple knowledge such as verb frame patterns, sense vectors based on collocations, statistical Korean local context information and co-occurring POS information. Verb frame patterns constructed with dictionary and corpus play an important role in resolving the sparseness problem of collocation data. Sense vectors are a set of collocation data when an English word having target selection ambiguities is to be translated to specific Korean target word. Statistical Korean Local Context Information is an N-gram information generated using Korean corpus. The co-occurring POS information is a statistically significant POS clue which appears with ambiguous word. To evaluate our approach, we applied the method to Tellus-EK* system, English-Korean automatic translation system currently developed at ETRI [1], [2]. The experiment showed promising results for diverse sentences from web documents.