In the ``Sandglass'' MT architecture, we identify the class of monosemous Japanese functional expressions and utilize it in the task of translating Japanese functional expressions into English. We employ the semantic equivalence classes of a recently compiled large scale hierarchical lexicon of Japanese functional expressions. We then study whether functional expressions within a class can be translated into a single canonical English expression. Based on the results of identifying monosemous semantic equivalence classes, this paper studies how to extract rules for translating functional expressions in Japanese patent documents into English. In this study, we use about 1.8M Japanese-English parallel sentences automatically extracted from Japanese-English patent families, which are distributed through the Patent Translation Task at the NTCIR-7 Workshop. Then, as a toolkit of a phrase-based SMT (Statistical Machine Translation) model, Moses is applied and Japanese-English translation pairs are obtained in the form of a phrase translation table. Finally, we extract translation pairs of Japanese functional expressions from the phrase translation table. Through this study, we found that most of the semantic equivalence classes judged as monosemous based on manual translation into English have only one translation rules even in the patent domain.

This paper presents an attempt at developing a technique of acquiring translation pairs of technical terms with sufficiently high precision from parallel patent documents. The approach taken in the proposed technique is based on integrating the phrase translation table of a state-of-the-art statistical phrase-based machine translation model, and compositional translation generation based on an existing bilingual lexicon for human use. Our evaluation results clearly show that the agreement between the two individual techniques definitely contribute to improving precision of translation candidates. We then apply the Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to the task of automatically validating translation candidates in the phrase translation table. Experimental evaluation results again show that the SVMs based approach to translation candidates validation can contribute to improving the precision of translation candidates in the phrase translation table.