Towards the Automatic Acquisition of Lexical Selection Rules

This paper is a study of a certain type of collocations and implication and application to acquisition of lexical selection rules in transfer-approach MT systems. Collocations reveal the co-occurrence possibilities of linguistic units in one language, which often require lexical selection rules to enhance the natural flow and clarity of MT output. The study presents an automatic acquisition and human verification process to acquire collocations and suggest possible candidates for lexical selection rules. The mechanism has been used in the development and enhancement of the Chinese-English and Japanese-English MT systems, and can be easily adapted to other language pairs. Future work includes expanding its usage to more language pairs and furthering its application to MT customers.