An English-To-Korean Machine Translator: MATES/EK

This note introduces at, English-to-Korean Machiue 'lYanslation System MA!t'ES/EK, which ha.s been developed as a research prototype and is still under upgrading in KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). MATES/EK is a transfl:r.-ba.~ed system and it has several subsystems tt, at can be used to support other MT-developments. They are gram-. mar developing environment systems, dictionary developing tools, a set of angmented context free gritm Inars for English syntactic analysis, and so on. 1. I n t r o d u c t i o n An ],;nglish-to-Korean mactdne translat ion system M A T E S / E K has been developed through a co-research done by KAIST and SF, RI (Systmns Engineering l{.esearch Ins t i tu te) from 1988 to 1992, and is still under ewflution in KA1ST. It has several tools snpport ing system dew~.lopment, such as the g rammar writing language and its de veloping environment, a set of augmented context free g rammar for English syntact ic analysis, ;rod dict ionary editor. This system has been developed for UNIX workstat ion. M A T E S / E K was originally developed using Common Lisp in order to test the possibility of English-to Korean machine t ranslat ion, and then it has been tota l ly reconstructed using C language. Its main target dmmfin is elect r ic /electronic papers and so the dict ionary ~tnd the grammars are specitically adjusted to the do*This research is partly supported by Center for ArtiIicial Intelligence Research (CAIR) (1992). main and one of sample sentences is II"li;F, computer m;tgazine September 1991 issue to test and ewduate the system. 2. O v e r v i e w of T h e S y s t e m M N I ' E S / E K is a typical transfi 'x-based system, which does English sentence analysis, tnmsforms the result (parse tree) into an intermediate repre-. sentation, and then transRn'ms it into ~L Korean syntactic s tructure to construct ~t Korean sentmlce. Figure 1 de.picts the ow'.rall configuration of M N I ' E S / E K , which has R)llowing features: * Morphological Analysis Using l'¢-gr;ml : We resolve tile category ambiguities by combining the N-gram and the rules. (Kim, 1992) . Augmented Context Free ( ' ,ranlmars for Ellglish Syntactic An~dysis : We dew'.loped a set of augmented context free gr~mmu~r rules ['or general English synt~mtic analysis a, td the. ~malyzer is implemented using '/bnfita~ LI{. parsing algori thm (Tomita, 1987). , I,exical Semantic Structure (LSS) to repre-sent the intermediate representat ion : The result of the syntact ic s t ructure is trans.tbrmed into an intermediate representa tkm LSS, which is a dependency s t ructure tha t is relatively independent to specific languages. In I, SS, the consti tuents in a sentence are combined only in head-dependent relation based on the lexieal categories, and there art.' no order relatkm between the const i tuents. Hence LSS is desirable for trans-