Rewriting Japanese compound nouns into expressions usable effectively in machine translation systems

Compound nouns consisting of a sequence of nominals are easily composed and used very often in Japanese documents. While this feature gives an expressive power to the language, it is a big problem in machine translation systems. We offer a method to rewrite the Japanese compound nouns into their equivalent expressions so that machine translation systems may use them as substitutes for the original compound nouns. An experiment of using the rewritten expressions in a machine translation system shows that our effort helps improve its performance considerably.