When conducting market research on machine translation, we research the volume of sales continuously in order to determine the scale of the machine translation market in Japan. We have officially announced these figures every year. Furthermore, since 2003, we administered questionnaires regarding the Web translation.

The statistical Machine Translation Model has two components: a language model and a translation model. This paper describes how to improve the quality of the translation model by using the common word pairs extracted by two asymmetric learning approaches. One set of word pairs is extracted by Viterbi alignment using a translation model, the other set is extracted by Viterbi alignment using another translation model created by reversing the languages. The common word pairs are extracted as the same word pairs in the two sets of word pairs. We conducted experiments using English and Japanese. Our method improves the quality of a original translation model by 5.7%. The experiments also show that the proposed learning method improves the word alignment quality independent of the training domain and the translation model. Moreover, we show that common word pairs are almost as useful as regular dictionary entries for training purposes.

This paper describes a prototype Japanese-to-Chinese automatic language translation system. ALT-J/C (Automatic Language Translator - Japanese-to-Chinese) is a semantic transfer based system, which is based on ALT-J/E (a Japanese-to-English system), but written to cope with Unicode. It is also designed to cope with constructions specific to Chinese. This system has the potential to become a framework for multilingual translation systems.

ATR has built a multi-language speech translation system called ATR-MATRIX. It consists of a spoken-language translation subsystem, which is the focus of this paper, together with a highly accurate speech recognition subsystem and a high-definition speech synthesis subsystem. This paper gives a road map of solutions to the problems inherent in spoken-language translation. Spoken-language translation systems need to tackle difficult problems such as ungrammaticality. contextual phenomena, speech recognition errors, and the high-speeds required for real-time use. We have made great strides towards solving these problems in recent years. Our approach mainly uses an example-based translation model called TDMT. We have added the use of extra-linguistic information, a decision tree learning mechanism, and methods dealing with recognition errors.