| This dissertation reports a research project conducted in the field of machine translation (MT) of natural human languages. For this research project, I designed an experimental English-Chinese machine translation system, based on relevant linguistic theories and computational techniques. The objective of this project is to develop new expertise for research and development work in English-Chinese MT, and design modules that can be adopted for application-based systems for automatic translation between English and Chinese.; The pre-application English-Chinese MT (ECMT) system, developed in this research project, is based on a model of the three operations: (1) analysis: mapping an input text onto a representation. (2) translation: mapping one representation onto another representation. (3) synthesis: generating a text from a representation.; As a small experimental sentence automatic translation system based on a constraint-controlled parser and structural transfer, ECMT provides real-time good Chinese translations for a small but non-trivial subset of English sentences.; New efforts are made in the design of my ECMT system. It is intended to be bi-directional (capable of handling translation between English and Chinese from either direction). It is to provide reasonable-to-good quality translations without significant human involvement, for texts from a limited technological subject domain. The system is to be easily extensible and repairable, and to be reasonably robust in operation. Since the system is only 'pre-application', the emphasis is to be on general applicability and output quality rather than on speed of performance.; The new expertise resulting from this research includes: modular design of the main components of an MT system; contrastive classification of linguistic components of the source and target languages; evaluation of the potential and limitations of system; insight into the bi-directionality and constraints of translation as well as the working environment of the transferrer; and determination of knowledge representation forms and uniform component interface. |
