Classifiers in Japanese-to-English Machine Translation

Bond, Francis; Ogura, Kentaro; Ikehara, Satoru

Classifiers in Japanese-to-English Machine Translation

Authors

Bond, Francis

Ogura, Kentaro

Ikehara, Satoru

Description

This paper proposes an analysis of classifiers into four major types: UNIT, METRIC, GROUP and SPECIES, based on properties of both Japanese and English. The analysis makes possible a uniform and straightforward treatment of noun phrases headed by classifiers in Japanese-to-English machine translation, and has been implemented in the MT system ALT-J/E. Although the analysis is based on the characteristics of, and differences between, Japanese and English, it is shown to be also applicable to the unrelated language Thai.
6 pages, LaTeX, uses gb4e.sty, fullname.bst