Development of a classifiers/quantifiers dictionary towards French-Japanese MT

Abstract: Although classifiers/quantifiers (CQs) expressions appear frequently in everyday communications or written documents, they are described neither in classical bilingual paper dictionaries , nor in machine-readable dictionaries. The paper describes a CQs dictionary, edited from the corpus we have annotated, and its usage in the framework of French-Japanese machine translation (MT). CQs treatment in MT often causes problems of lexical ambiguity, polylexical phrase recognition difficulties in analysis and doubtful output in transfer-generation, in particular for distant languages pairs like French and Japanese. Our basic treatment of CQs is to annotate the corpus by UNL-UWs (Universal Networking Language-Universal words) 1 , and then to produce a bilingual or multilingual dictionary of CQs, based on synonymy through identity of UWs.