Automatic alignment of bilingual texts is useful to example-based machine translation by facilitating the creation of example pairs of translation for the machine. Two main approaches to automatic alignment have been reported in the literature. They are lexical approach and statistical approach. The former looks for relationships between lexical contents of the bilingual texts in order to find alignment pairs, while the latter uses statistical correlation between sentence lengths of the bilingual texts as the basis of matching. This paper describes a combination of the two approaches in aligning Japanese-Cinese bilingual texts by allowing kanji contents and sentence lengths in the texts to work together in achieving an alignment process. Because of the sentential structure differences between Japanese and Chinese, matching at the sentence level may result in frequent matching between a number of sentences en masses. In view of this, the current work also attempts to create shorter alignment pairs by permitting sentences to be matched with clauses or phrases of the other text if possible. While such matching is more difficult and error-prone, the reliance on kanji contents has proven to be very useful in minimizing the errors. The current research has thus found solutions to problems that are unique to the present work.

This paper describes the optical characteristics and static fatigue reliability of a zirconia alignment sleeve, which is a component part of an optical connector with zirconia ferrules. This combination of sleeve and ferrules hardly generates any wear debris during connector insertion and removal cycles. This has reduced the cleaning frequency of the ferrule endface during cycles and greatly improved the return loss stability of the optical connectors. The zirconia alignment sleeve enables stable return loss characteristics to be achieved over a wide temperature range as it has the same thermal expansion coefficient as the zirconia ferrule. Furthermore, the gauge retention force for the zirconia alignment sleeve is defined with a view to its practical use. This force must be between 2.0 and 3.9 N to allow stable optical connections to be made under various mechanical and environmental conditions. We also clarify the conditions for a proof test by which to prevent the occurrence of static fatigue fractures in the sleeve, and we confirm the validity of the test. The static fatigue parameters for zirconia ceramics and derived from the static fatigue theory for brittle materials and fracture testing. We use these static fatigue parameters to predict the lifetime of a zirconia sleeve under working stress. An appropriate stress level for the proof test which eliminates weak sleeves, is about 3 times greater than working stress. The strength of the sleeve as demonstrated in the proof test is confirmed by accelerative stress aging. The performance of this sleeve is superior to that of a conventional copper alloy sleeve and the proof test confirms its reliability; under 0.1 FIT for 20 years of use.

Selective epitaxial growth technology has been extended to the base formation of a transistor on the basis of the SATURN (Self-Alignment Technology Utilizing Reserved Nitride) process, a high-speed bipolar LSI processing technology. The formation of a self-aligned base contact, coupled with SIC (Selective Ion-implanted Collector) fabricated by lowenergy ion implantation, has not only narrowed the transistor active regions but has drastically reduced the base width. A final base width of 800 and a maximum cut-off frequency of 31 GHz were achieved.

We introduce new computer algorithm of multiple alignment as an application of "Simulated Annealing" method. Simulated Annealing has been applied to some combinational optimization problems such as travelling salesman problem. After giving short mathematical explanation of this method, we construct genetic distance and matrix corresponding to the object function in the annealing theory for the multiple alignment. Our method is better than other alignment in the sense that we obtain a result having a smaller value for the genetic distance. We discuss further development along on new method.