In this paper, the major problems of the current machine translation systems are first outlined. A new direction, highlighting the system capability to be customizable and self-learnable, is then proposed for attacking the described problems, which are mainly resulted from the very complicated characteristics of natural languages. The proposed solution adopts an unsupervised two-way training mechanism and a parameterized architecture to acquire the required statistical knowledge, such that the system can be easily adapted to different domains and various preferences of individual users.

An automatic compound retrieval method is proposed to extract compounds within a text message. It uses n-gram mutual information, relative frequency count and parts of speech as the features for compound extraction. The problem is modeled as a two-class classification problem based on the distributional characteristics of n-gram tokens in the compound and the non-compound clusters. The recall and precision using the proposed approach are 96.2% and 48.2% for bigram compounds and 96.6% and 39.6% for trigram compounds for a testing corpus of 49,314 words. A significant cutdown in processing time has been observed.

An automatic treebank conversion method is proposed in this paper to convert a treebank into another treebank. A new treebank associated with a different grammar can be generated automatically from the old one such that the information in the original treebank can be transformed to the new one and be shared among different research communities. The simple algorithm achieves conversion accuracy of 96.4% when tested on 8,867 sentences between two major grammar revisions of a large MT system.

In natural language processing, ambiguity resolution is a central issue, and can be regarded as a preference assignment problem. In this paper, a Generalized Probabilistic Semantic Model (GPSM) is proposed for preference computation. An effective semantic tagging procedure is proposed for tagging semantic features. A semantic score function is derived based on a score function, which integrates lexical, syntactic and semantic preference under a uniform formulation. The semantic score measure shows substantial improvement in structural disambiguation over a syntax-based approach.