We introduce our thesaurus, the semantic attribute system, which we have developed for Japanese-to-English machine translatIon. The thesaurus is composed ofthree semantic attribute systems, a common noun semantic attribute system which classifies noun concepts in a hierarchy of "is-a" and "has-a" re1ationships, a proper noun semantic attribute system winch classifies proper noun concepts in more detail, and a verbal semantic attribute system which classifies concepts of predicates, focusing on the meanings of predicates and their functions in languages. We describe how information from these semantic attribute systems is used in the Japanese semantic word dictionary, Japanese-to-English word transfer dictionary and Japanese-to-English structure transfer dictionary.
We showed how these information is used in: (1) sense disambiguation; (2) analysis of compound words, (3) context processing like supplementation of ellipsed subjects and objects, (4) automatic rewriting of Japanese expressions peculiar to Japanese into easily translated Japanese expressions; and (5) translating whole structures using direct parse tree transfer.
Machine translation, Thesaurus, Dictionary, Japanese, English