Machine translation method using inductive learning for mobile terminal

The authors propose a machine translation technique for a compact terminal such as a mobile telephone. With a compact terminal that emphasizes portability such as a mobile phone, the number of keys that the terminal can be equipped with is necessarily restricted by the limited size of the terminal itself. Therefore, to enable input by using only this small number of keys, the proposed technique assigns multiple characters to a single input key. In addition, to enable rapid input, a single character is entered by a single key-press. As a result, the number sequence that is the input string to the proposed technique is associated with multiple character strings, and thus there also exist multiple translation candidates for this number sequence, thereby increasing ambiguity. Nevertheless, by using inductive learning, the proposed technique can automatically acquire translation rules that depend on the subject and use these rules for translation. This high level of adaptability enables the proposed technique to eliminate ambiguity as much as possible during the translation process to obtain a correct translation. The authors created a system based on the proposed technique and assigned a small number of word translation rules in advance to perform Japanese-to-English machine translation experiments. The results verified the effectiveness of the proposed technique by showing that the final translation precision of approximately 70% and the translation efficiency were high. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 87(9): 33–47, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20100