Determination of referential property and number of nouns in Japanese sentences for machine translation into English

摘要

When translating Japanese nouns into English, we face the problem of articlesand numbers which the Japanese language does not have, but which are necessaryfor the English composition. To solve this difficult problem we classified thereferential property and the number of nouns into three types respectively.This paper shows that the referential property and the number of nouns in asentence can be estimated fairly reliably by the words in the sentence. Manyrules for the estimation were written in forms similar to rewriting rules inexpert systems. We obtained the correct recognition scores of 85.5\% and 89.0\%in the estimation of the referential property and the number respectively forthe sentences which were used for the construction of our rules. We testedthese rules for some other texts, and obtained the scores of 68.9\% and 85.6\%respectively.