Experiments and prospects of Example-Based Machine Translation

ABSTRACT

EBMT (Example-Based Machine Translation) is proposed. EBMT retrieves similar examples (pairs of source phrases, sentences, or texts and their translations) from a database of examples, adapting the examples to translate a new input. EBMT has the following features: (1) It is easily upgraded simply by inputting appropriate examples to the database; (2) It assigns a reliability factor to the translation result; (3) It is accelerated effectively by both indexing and parallel computing; (4) It is robust because of best-match reasoning; and (5) It well utilizes translator expertise. A prototype system has been implemented to deal with a difficult translation problem for conventional Rule-Based Machine Translation (RBMT), i.e., translating Japanese noun phrases of the form "N₁ no N₂" into English. The system has achieved about a 78% success rate on average. This paper explains the basic idea of EBMT, illustrates the experiment in detail, explains the broad applicability of EBMT to several difficult translation problems for RBMT and discusses the advantages of integrating EBMT with RBMT.

REFERENCES

• 1: Furuse, O., Sumita, E. and Iida, H. 1990 "A Method for Realizing Transfer-Driven Machine Translation", Reprint of WGNL 80-8, IPSJ, (in Japanese).
• 2: Hirai, M. and Kitahashi, T. 1986, "A Semantic Classification of Noun Modifications in Japanese Sentences and Their Analysis", Reprint of WGNL 58-1, IPSJ, (in Japanese).
• 3: Kolodner, J. and Riesbeck, C. 1989 "Case-Based Reasoning", Tutorial Textbook of 11th IJCAI.
• 4: Makoto Nagao, A framework of a mechanical translation between Japanese and English by analogy principle, Proc. of the international NATO symposium on Artificial and human intelligence, p.173-180, October 1984, Lyon, France
• 5: Nagao, M., Tsujii, J., Nakamura, J. 1986 "Machine Translation from Japanese into English", Proceedings of the IEEE, 74, 7.
• 6: Makoto Nagao, Language engineering: the real bottle neck of natural language processing, Proceedings of the 12th conference on Computational linguistics, p.448-448, August 22-27, 1988, Budapest, Hungry [doi>10.3115/991719.991727]
• 7: Nirenburg, S. 1987 Machine Translation, Cambridge University Press, 350.
• 8: Yoshihiko Nitta, Idiosyncratic gap: a tough prolem to structure-bound machine translation, Proceedings of the 11th coference on Computational linguistics, August 25-29, 1986, Bonn, Germany [doi>10.3115/991365.991394]
• 9: Ogura, K., Hashimoto, K., and Morimoto, T. 1989 "Object-Oriented User Interface for Linguistic Database", Proceedings of Working Conference on Data and Knowledge Base Integration, University of Keele, England.
• 10: Ohno, S. and Hamanishi, M. 1984 Ruigo-Shin-Jiten, Kadokawa, 932, (in Japanese).
• 11: Sadler, V. 1989a "Translating with a Simulated Bilingual Knowledge Bank(BKB)", BSO/Research.
• 12: Sadler, V. 1989b Working with Analogical Semantics, Foris Publications, 256.
• 13: Sato, S. and Nagao, M. 1989 "Memory-Based Translation", Reprint of WGNL 70--9, IPSJ, (in Japanese).
• 14: Satoshi Sato , Makoto Nagao, Toward memory-based translation, Proceedings of the 13th conference on Computational linguistics, p.247-252, August 20-25, 1990, Helsinki, Finland [doi>10.3115/991146.991190]
• 15: Akira Shimazu , Shozo Naito , Hirosato Nomura, Semantic structure analysis of Japanese noun phrases with adnominal particles, Proceedings of the 25th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, p.123-130, July 06-09, 1987, Stanford, California [doi>10.3115/981175.981193]
• 16: Craig Stanfill , David Waltz, Toward memory-based reasoning, Communications of the ACM, v.29 n.12, p.1213-1228, Dec. 1986 [doi>10.1145/7902.7906]
• 17: Sumita, E. and Tsutsumi, Y. 1988 "A Translation Aid System Using Flexible Text Retrieval Based on Syntax-matching", Proceedings of The Second International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages, CMU, Pittsburgh.
• 18: Sumita, E., Iida, H. and Kohyama, H. 1990a "Translating with Examples: A New Approach to Machine Translation", Proceedings of The Third International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages, Texas, 203--212.
• 19: Sumita, E. Iida, H. and Kohyama, H. 1990b "Example-based Approach in Machine Translation", Proceedings of InfoJapan '90, Part 2: 65--72.
• 20: Sumita, E. and Iida, H. 1991 "Acceleration of Example-Based Machine Translation", (manuscript).