SYSTRAN MT Dictionary Development

Abstract

SYSTRAN has demonstrated success in the MT field with its long history spanning nearly 30 years. As a general-purpose fully automatic MT system, SYSTRAN employs a transfer approach. Among its several components, large, carefully encoded, high-quality dictionaries are critical to SYSTRAN's translation capability. A total of over 2.4 million words and expressions are now encoded in the dictionaries for twelve source language systems (30 language pairs- one per year!). SYSTRAN'S dictionaries, along with its parsers, transfer modules, and generators, have been tested on huge amounts of text, and contain large terminology databases covering various domains and detailed linguistic rules. Using these resources, SYSTRAN MT systems have successfully served practical translation needs for nearly 30 years, and built a reputation in the MT world for their large, mature dictionaries. This paper describes various aspects of SYSTRAN MT dictionary development as an important part of the development and refinement of SYSTRAN MT systems. There are 4 major sections: 1) Role and Importance of Dictionaries in the SYSTRAN Paradigm describes the importance of coverage and depth in the dictionaries; 2) Dictionary Structure discusses the specifics of