When and How to Disambiguate? — Countability in Machine Translation —

Potentially all Japanese nouns are under-specified with respect to number and countability. To ask a user to interactively disambiguate each one is not feasible, and it can be impossible for a native speaker to do. Therefore it is important to disambiguate automatically. In addition, even if the system makes a mistake about number, it is rarely fatal. There are some ambiguities involved with the use of classifiers that are more likely to be serious and require world knowledge such as 500-gm-no ringo which could mean either a 500gm apple or 500gm of apple(s). It may be appropriate to ask for user input to disambiguate such examples, although it may be preferable to query a knowledge base first.