Interactive generalization of a translation example using queries based on a semantic hierarchy

This paper addresses the issue of acquiring translation rules for machine translation (MT) systems that adopt a transfer approach. These rules are semantic pattern pairs (SPPs) of source and target languages. Practical MT systems must additionally contain a huge number of SPPs corresponding to rarely-used predicates and predicate usages. Such SPPs are difficult to automatically acquire with corpus-based methods. To solve this difficulty, this paper proposes a method to acquire SPPs by using queries based on a semantic hierarchy. The proposed method asks the lexicographer for the necessary information in order to generalize the conditions of SPPs and then gradually generalizes these conditions. Experimental results show that the proposed method allows the acquisition of more plausible conditions within almost the same time spent for manual generalization.