Research on English functional noun phrases and their application
Huang De-gen · Dalian Ligong Daxue xuebao · 2012
A new concept of English noun phrases,functional noun phrases,is put forward in terms of their syntactic functions.The new concept is further compared with base noun phrases and maximal noun phrases.This concept is then introduced to solve the ambiguity problem,which occurs in the English-to-Chinese machine translation results obtained by Google online translation system.The test results show that the introduction of functional noun phrases is an efficient approach to structural ambiguity resolution at least in two cases: A noun or noun phrase is closely related to the preceding verb;A noun or noun phrase,together with the preceding preposition,functions as the adjunct or the post modifier.This study,therefore,is an important approach to solving structural ambiguity and thus improving the translation quality of English-Chinese machine translation.