An Example-Based Approach to Japanese-to-English Translation of Tense, Aspect, and Modality

We have developed a new method for Japanese-to-English translation of tense, aspect, and modality that uses an example-based method. In this method the similarity between input and example sentences is defined as the degree of semantic matching between the expressions at the ends of the sentences. Our method also uses the k-nearest neighbor method in order to exclude the effects of noise; for example, wrongly tagged data in the bilingual corpora. Experiments show that our method can translate tenses, aspects, and modalities more accurately than the top-level MT software currently available on the market can. Moreover, it does not require hand-craft rules.