Since most Korean postpositions signal grammatical functions such as syntactic relations, generation of incorrect Korean post-positions results in producing ungrammatical outputs in machine translations targeting Korean. Chinese and Korean belong to morphosyntactically divergent language pairs, and usually Korean postpositions do not have their counterparts in Chinese. In this paper, we propose a preprocessing method for a statistical MT system that generates more adequate Korean postpositions. We transfer syntactic relations of subject-verb-object patterns in Chinese sentences and enrich them with transferred syntactic relations in order to reduce the morpho-syntactic differences. The effectiveness of our proposed method is measured with lexical units of various granularities. Human evaluation also suggest improvements over previous methods, which are consistent with the result of the automatic evaluation.

We propose a Chinese dependency tree reordering method for Chinese-to-Korean SMT systems through analyzing systematic differences between the Chinese and Korean languages. Translating predicate-predicate patterns in Chinese into Korean raises various issues such as long-distance reordering. This paper concentrates on syntactic reordering of predicate-predicate patterns in Chinese dependency trees through contrastively analyzing construction types in Chinese and their corresponding translations in Korean. We explore useful linguistic knowledge that assists effective syntactic reordering of Chinese dependency trees; we design two experiments with different kinds of linguistic knowledge combined with the phrase and hierarchical phrase-based SMT systems, and assess the effectiveness of our proposed methods. The experiments achieved significant improvements by resolving the long-distance reordering problem.

We introduce a novel translation rule that captures discontinuous, partial constituent, and non-projective phrases from source language. Using the traversal order sequences of the dependency tree, our proposed method 1) extracts the synchronous rules in linear time and 2) combines them efficiently using the CYK chart parsing algorithm. We analytically show the effectiveness of this translation rule in translating relatively free order sentences, and empirically investigate the coverage of our proposed method.

For a language pair such as Chinese and Korean that belong to entirely different language families in terms of typology and genealogy, finding the correspondences is quite obscure in word alignment. We present annotation guidelines for Chinese-Korean word alignment through contrastive analysis of morpho-syntactic encodings. We discuss the differences in verbal systems that cause most of linking obscurities in annotation process. Systematic comparison of verbal systems is conducted by analyzing morpho-syntactic encodings. The viewpoint of grammatical category allows us to define consistent and systematic instructions for linguistically distant languages such as Chinese and Korean. The scope of our guidelines is limited to the alignment between Chinese and Korean, but the instruction methods exemplified in this paper are also applicable in developing systematic and comprehensible alignment guidelines for other languages having such different linguistic phenomena.