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<Paper uid="P98-2238">
  <Title>Dialect MT: A Case Study between Cantonese and Mandarin</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
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Abstract
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    <Paragraph position="0"> Machine Translation (MT) need not be confined to inter-language activities. In this paper, we discuss inter-dialect MT in general and Cantonese-Mandarin MT in particular. Mandarin and Cantonese are two most important dialects of Chinese. The former is the national lingua franca and the latter is the most influential dialect in South China, Hong Kong and overseas. The difference in between is such that mutual intelligibility is impossible. This paper presents, from a computational point of view, a comparative study of Mandarin and Cantonese at the three aspects of sound systems, grammar rules and vocabulary contents, followed by a discussion of the design and implementation of a dialect MT system between them.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Introduction Automatic Machine Translation (MT) between different languages, such as English, Chinese and Japanese, has been an attractive but extremely difficult research area. Over forty years of MT history has seen limited practical translation systems developed or commercialized in spite of the considerable development in computer science and linguistic studies. High quality machine translation between two languages requires deep understanding of the intended meaning of the source language sentences, which in turn involves disambiguation reasoning based on intelligent searches and proper uses of a great amount of relevant knowledge, including common sense (Nirenburg, et. al. 1992). The task is so demanding that some researchers are looking more seriously at machine-aided human translation as an altemative way to achieve automatic machine translation (Martin, 1997a, 1997b).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Translation or interpretation is not necessarily an inter-language activity. In many cases, it happens among dialects within a single language. Similarly, MT can be inter-dialect as well. In fact, automatic translation or interpretation seems much more practical and achievable here since inter-dialect difference is much less serious than inter-language difference. Inter-dialect MT' also represents a promising market, especially in China. In the following sections we will discuss inter-dialect MT with special emphasis on the pair of Chinese Cantonese and Chinese Mandarin.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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