Machine Translation in an Information Management System

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to report on the development and testing of an English-Hangul, Hangul-English machine translation system. The system, known as the Hangul English Support System (HESS), is part of the Theater Automated Command and Control Information Management System (TACCIMS). TACCIMS is an extensive bilingual information network of over 400 workstations located throughout the Republic of Korea and Okinawa for use by the Commander-in-Chief Combined Forces Command (CINC CFC) (US/ROK). The HESS machine translation component plays a central role in translating a variety of input types, such as word processing files, data base requests, map graphics, and electronic mail. HESS is an important contribution to machine translation technology because: (1) It has a large scope of translation responsibilities; (2) It operates in a real-time, operational environment; and (3) It is designed for use by monolingual users. The paper describes the linguistic approach to translation that is based on lexical functional grammar and chart parsing. The development of the 60,000+dictionary entries is described. An interactive pre-editing mode is presented as an on-line tool for resolving lexical and syntactic ambiguities. The man-machine interface technology that underlies the pre-editing feature is discussed later in this paper. The paper also describes the development of a strategy to test the accuracy of the translations, focusing on the development of test sentences in the source text and measuring accuracy of the target text through an edit ratio function. Finally, the paper considers approaches to enhancing the overall performance of machine translation technology for information management systems of the future.