Segmentation and Translation of Japanese Multi-word Loanwords
James Breen, Timothy J. Baldwin, Francis T. Bond · 2012
The Japanese language has absorbed large numbers of loanwords from many languages, in particular English. As well as using single loanwords, compound nouns, multiword expressions (MWEs), etc. constructed from loanwords can be found in use in very large quantities. In this paper we describe a system which has been developed to segment Japanese loanword MWEs and construct likely English translations. The system, which leverages the availability of large bilingual dictionaries of loanwords and English n-gram corpora, achieves high levels of accuracy in discriminating between single loanwords and MWEs, and in segmenting MWEs. It also generates useful translations of MWEs, and has the potential to being a major aid to lexicographers in this area.