Hybrid Approaches to Improvement of Translation Quality in Web-based English-Korean Machine Translation

The previous English-Korean MT system that was the transfer-based MT system and applied to only written text enumerated a following brief list of the problems that had not seemed to be easy to solve in the near future : 1) processing of non-continuous idiomatic expressions 2) reduction of too many ambiguities in English syntactic analysis 3) robust processing for failed or illformed sentences 4) selecting correct word correspondence between several alternatives 5) generation of Korean sentence style. The problems can be considered as factors that have influence on the translation quality of machine translation system. This paper describes the symbolic and statistical hybrid approaches to solutions of problems of the previous English-to-Korean machine translation system in terms of the improvement of translation quality. The solutions are now successfully applied to the web-based English-Korean machine translation system "FrolnTo/EK" which has been developed from 1997.