In a spoken language translation system, when the input utterance can't be correctly parsed and translated, if the system can recognize the other possible expressions of the input, it will be very helpful for improving the performance of the translation system. In this paper, we introduce the basic ideas for paraphrasing Chinese utterances and present the preliminary results. In our approach, the key features of an input utterance, including the expression type, tense and syntactic components etc., will be extracted first by using parsing and chunk dependency analysis techniques. The long complex utterances will be segmented. Based on the analysis results, the possible expressions are generated by using language generating techniques.
Utterance paraphrasing, Spoken language translation, spoken language parsing