A Study on Cross-Lingual Sentence Similarity Analysis of Standard Marine Communication Phrases (SMCP)

Every language communication involves its own attention to linguistic, cultural, and social nuances. Maritime communication is no exception. Even with the aim of achieving clarity, communication onboard and ashore related to vessel operations may be affected by these linguistic characteristics. To support clear communication at sea, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) introduced the Standard Marine Communication Phrases (SMCP) as a standardized set of expressions. However, due to differences in vocabulary systems and idiomatic usage, the same SMCP phrase can be expressed differently depending on the language. This study used sentence transformer models to analyze semantic similarity across English, Korean, and Chinese SMCP phrases. The analysis results show that lower similarity often stemmed from, for example, conceptual differences, culturally specific terms, and idiomatic usage. Further research is required to explore how linguistic variation can affect maritime communication. maritime high school students results. This research is expected to highlight the potential use of general LLMs in maritime contexts.