The Transfer Phase of the Mu Machine Translation System

The interlingual approach to MT has been repeatedly advocated by researchers originally interested Jn natural language understanding who take machine translation to be one possible application. However, not only the ambiguity but also the vagueness which every natural language inevitably has leads this approach into essential difficulties. In contrast, our project, the Mu-project, adopts the transfer approach as the basic framework of MT. This paper describes the detailed construction of the transfer phase of our system from Japanese to English, and gives some examples of problems which seem difficult to treat in the interlJngual approach. The basic design principles of the transfer phase of our system have already been mentioned in (i) (2). Some of the principles which are relevant to the topic of this paper are: (a)Multiple Layer of Grammars (b)Multiple Layer Presentation (c) Lexicon Driven Processing (d) Form-Oriented Dictionary Description This paper also shows how these principles are realized in the current system.