Interlingua-Based Broad-Coverage Korean-to-English Translation in CCLINC

At MIT Lincoln Laboratory, we have been developing a Koreanto-English machine translation system CCLINC (Common Coalition Language System at Lincoln Laboratory). The CCLINC Korean-to-English translation system consists of two core modules, language understanding and generation modules mediated by a language neutral meaning representation called a semantic frame. The key features of the system include: (i) Robust efficient parsing of Korean (a verb final language with overt case markers, relatively free word order, and frequent omissions of arguments). (ii) High quality translation via word sense disambiguation and accurate word order generation of the target language. (iii) Rapid system development and porting to new domains via knowledge-based automated acquisition of grammars. Having been trained on Korean newspaper articles on “missiles” and “chemical biological warfare,” the system produces the translation output sufficient for content understanding of the original document. 1. SYSTEM OVERVIEW The CCLINC The CCLINC Korean-to-English translation system is a component of the CCLINC Translingual Information System, the focus languages of which are English and Korean, [11,17]. Translingual Information System Structure is given in Figure 1. Given the input text or speech, the language understanding system parses the input, and transforms the parsing output into a language neutral meaning representation called a semantic frame, [16,17]. The semantic frame  the key properties of which will be discussed in Section 2.3  becomes the input to the generation system. The generation system produces the target to the generation system, the semantic frame can be utilized for other applications such as translingual information extraction and language translation output after word order arrangement, vocabulary replacement, and the appropriate surface form realization in the target language, [6]. Besides serving as the input question-answering, [12]. In this paper, we focus on the Koreanto-English text translation component of CCLINC. Figure 1. CCLINC Translingual Information System Structure 2. ROBUST PARSING, MEANING REPRESENTATION, AND AUTOMATED GRAMMAR ACQUISITION ∗ This work was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency under the contract number F19628-00-C-0002. Opinions, interpretations, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the United States Air Force. 1 For other approaches to Korean-to-English translation, the readers are referred to Korean-to-English translation by Egedi, Palmer, Park and Joshi 1994, a transfer-based approach using synchronous tree adjoining grammar, [5], and Dorr 1997, a small-scale interlingua-based approach, using Jackendoff’s lexical conceptual structure as the interlingua, [4]. OTHER LANGUAGES SEMANTIC FRAMES (COMMON COALITION LANGUAGE) SEMANTIC FRAMES (COMMON COALITION LANGUAGE) UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING GENERATION GENERATION GENERATION GENERATION C4I INFORMATION ACCESS C4I INFORMATION ACCESS ENGLISH TEXT OR SPEECH KOREAN TEXT OR SPEECH Report Documentation Page Form Approved