Enhancing a Dictionary for Transfer Rule Acquisition

The JMdict/EDICT Japanese-English Dictionary is a freely-available dictionary distributed in XML (JMdict)and text (EDICT) formats. It is widely used as a source of lexical material in dictionary systems and text-processing projects. We propose two refinements to make the dictionary more computationally tractable: marking entries where the English is not a translation equivalent and expanding contracted entries. We then propose and apply semi-automatic methods to refine existing entries. The resulting dictionary is shown to be more suitable for the construction of machine translation rules.