This paper describes a sentence pattern-based English-Korean machine translation system backed up by a rule-based module as a solution to the translation of long sentences. A rule-based English-Korean MT system typically suffers from low translation accuracy for long sentences due to poor parsing performance. In the proposed method we only use chunking information on the phrase-level of the parse result (i.e. NP, PP, and AP). By applying a sentence pattern directly to a chunking result, the high performance of analysis and a good quality of translation are expected. The parsing efficiency problem in the traditional RBMT approach is resolved by sentence partitioning, which is generally assumed to have many problems. However, we will show that the sentence partitioning has little side effect, if any, in our approach, because we use only the chunking results for the transfer. The coverage problem of a pattern-based method is overcome by applying sentence pattern matching recursively to the sub-sentences of the input sentence, in case there is no exact matching pattern to the input sentence.

This paper describes our ongoing project “Korean-Chinese Machine Translation System”. The main knowledge of our system is verb patterns. Each verb can have several meanings and each meaning of a verb is represented by a verb pattern. A verb pattern consists of a source language pattern part for the analysis and the corresponding target language pattern part for the generation. Each pattern part, according to the degree of generality, contains lexical or semantic information for the arguments or adjuncts of each verb meaning. In this approach, accurate analysis can directly lead to natural and correct generation. Furthermore as the transfer mainly depends upon verb patterns, the translation rate is expected to go higher, as the size of verb pattern grows larger.

The previous English-Korean MT system that have been developed in Korea have dealt with only written text as translation object. Most of them enumerated a following list of the problems that had not seemed to be easy to solve in the near future : 1) processing of non-continuous idiomatic expressions 2) reduction of too many POS or structural ambiguities 3) robust processing for long sentence and parsing failure 4) selecting correct word correspondence between several alternatives. The problems can be considered as important factors that have influence on the translation quality of machine translation system. This paper describes not only the solutions of problems of the previous English-to-Korean machine translation systems but also the HTML tags management between two structurally different languages, English and Korean. Through the solutions we translate successfully English web documents into Korean one in the English-to-Korean web translator "FromTo/Web-EK" which has been developed from 1997.