Simultaneous English-Japanese Spoken Language Translation Based on Incremental Dependency Parsing and Transfer

This paper proposes a method for incre-mentally translating English spoken lan-guage into Japanese. To realize simulta-neous translation between languages with different word order, such as English and Japanese, our method utilizes the feature that the word order of a target language is flexible. To resolve the problem of generating a grammatically incorrect sen-tence, our method uses dependency struc-tures and Japanese dependency constraints to determine the word order of a transla-tion. Moreover, by considering the fact that the inversion of predicate expressions occurs more frequently in Japanese spo-ken language, our method takes advan-tage of a predicate inversion to resolve the problem that Japanese has the predicate at the end of a sentence. Furthermore, our method includes the function of canceling an inversion by restating a predicate when the translation is incomprehensible due to the inversion. We implement a prototype translation system and conduct an exper-iment with all 578 sentences in the ATIS corpus. The results indicate improvements in comparison to two other methods.