Korean-English Machine Translation Using Type-inheritance Combinatory Categorial Grammar

This paper introduces a Korean-English machine translation (MT) system whose theoretical framework is a Type-inheritance Combinatory Categorial Grammar (TCCG). This system makes use of a semantic transfer method in the MT system, and Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) is used for the semantic transfer. After the MRS structure of the source language (SL) is transferred into that of the target language (TL), the sentence in the TL is generated by the generation modules based on the transferred MRS. The advantages of using this translation method are that (ⅰ) two grammars in SL and TL can independently be used for linguistic hypothesis testing and natural language processing (NLP) of each language, (ⅱ) a bidirectional MT systems can easily be developed, and (ⅲ) lexical idiosyncrasy can effectively be handled.