Recognizing Coordinate Structures for Machine Translation of English Patent Documents

Patent machine translation is one of main target areas of current practical MT systems. Patent documents have their own peculiar description style. Especially, abstracts or claims in patent documents are characterized by their long and complex syntactic structures, which are often caused by coordination. So, syntactic analysis of patent documents requires special treatment for coordination. This paper describes a method to deal with long sentences in patent documents by recognizing coordinate structures. Coordinate structures are recognized using a similarity table which reflects parallelism between conjuncts. Our method is applied to a practical MT system and improves its quality and efficiency.