Translation of Quantifiers in Japanese-Chinese Machine Translation

Abstract

In this paper we describe a translation method for numeral quantifiers in rule-based Japanese-Chinese machine translation. In Chinese, as in Japanese, numerals quantify nouns along with appropriate measure words (classifiers); numerals cannot quantify nouns by themselves (especially in Chinese). Those numeral quantifiers often cause errors in Japanese-Chinese machine translation because of the wide variety of the Chinese classifiers and complicated correspondence between Japanese and Chinese classifiers. It depends on the quantified noun which classifier is appropriate. Accordingly, we devised a method for classifying the quantified nouns by their semantic attributes through comparative analysis of quantifiers in Chinese and Japanese sentences, and obtained translation rules for quantifiers that use the classification method. We conducted an experiment on the translation rules with our experimental Japanese-Chinese MT system and by manual using 600 sentences. The translation rules achieved an accuracy of 92.8%, which indicates their effectiveness.