An intelligent electronic English-Japanese dictionary system can disambiguate the senses of prepositions appearing in a sentence just as language experts do
Yasunori Ohtsuka, H. Yamaguchi, Seiichi Yamamoto, Noboru Sugie · 2003
Due to the remarkable progress in computer network technology as well as artificial intelligence, in the very near future we Japanese may read English texts through CRT displays with the aid of an electronic English-Japanese dictionary. Whenever we encounter any unknown word, we may learn the sense from the dictionary by pointing at the unknown word with a mouse. It is easy to display all the contents of the dictionary related to any word of concern. However, the contents would contain more than enough senses and the user may be at a loss which of them to choose. For example, if we look up the preposition "of" in Shogakukan Random House English-Japanese Dictionary, 2nd Edition, we find 20 senses. Which of the 20 senses should be chosen in a given sentence? Language experts seem to make full use of various knowledge sources, such as syntax and semantics, to disambiguate the senses to narrow down to the right one. The article is a preliminary attempt to incorporate language experts' intelligence into an intelligent electronic English-Japanese dictionary system.