The Automatic Translation of Discourse Structures

We empirically show that there are significant differences between the discourse structure of Japanese texts and the discourse structure of their corresponding English translations. To improve translation quality, we propose a computational model for rewriting discourse structures. When we train our model on a parallel corpus of manually built Japanese and English discourse structure trees, we learn to rewrite Japanese trees as trees that are closer to the natural English rendering than the original ones. 1 Motivation Almost all current MT systems process text one sentence at a time. Because of this limited focus, MT systems cannot re-group and re-order the clauses and sentences of an input text to achieve the most natural rendering in a target language. Yet, even between languages as close as English and French, there is a 10% mismatch in number of sentences - - what is said in two sentences in one language is said in only one, or in three, in the other (Gale and Church, 1993). For d...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ANLP
• Authors: Daniel Marcu, Lynn Carlson, Maki Watanabe
• Keywords: ANLP 2000, Discourse Structure, Discourse Structure Trees, MT Systems