Private networks are becoming globalized and more complicated through LAN-WAN interconnection. While WANs are managed by CMIP, LANs are managed by SNMP. To achieve end-to-end management, the integration of CMIP-based and SNMP-based management is important. We have developed an MI (Management Integration) platform for CMIP-based and SNMP-based management. It provides OSI SMF (Systems Management Function)-based unified basic management services to upper level applications regardless of the differences between CMIP-based and SNMP-based management. It achieves this with two modules: a management information transfer integration module that mainly covers protocol and data format differences between them, and a basic management module that covers functional differences. The translation of management information in the former module can be changed flexibly because the translation is based on an external script file. The latter module has additional SMF-like functions for the management of SNMP agents in addition to SMF manager role functions, etc. Prototype evaluation has demonstrated the feasibility of the MI platform.

This paper is concerned with spoken language translation in multimedia communication environment. We summarize the current research activities, by describing various spoken language translation systems and the multimodal technology related to spoken language translation. We propose a spoken language translation system that exploits the multimedia communication environment in order to overcome the limits caused by imperfect speech recognition. Our approach is in contrast to that of most conventional speech translation systems that limit their dialogue domains to obtain better speech recognition. We also propose a performance measure for spoken language translation systems. Our measure is defined as the ratio of the information quantities at each end of communication. Using this measure, we show that multimedia enhance spoken language translation systems.

This paper presents efficient algorithms for updating moving octrees with real-time performance. The first algorithm works for octrees undergoing both translation and rotation motion; it works efficiently by compacting source octrees into a smaller set of cubes (not necessarily standard octree cubes) as a precomputation step, and by using a fast, exact cube/cube intersection test between source octree cubas and target octree cubes. A parallel version of the algorithm is also described. Finally, the paper presents an efficient algorithm for the more limited case of octree translation only. Experimental results are given to show the efficiency of the algorithms in comparison to competing algorithms. In addition to being fast, the algorithms presented are also space efficient in that they can produce target octrees in the linear octree representation.

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.

Finite state translation systems (fsts') are a widely studied computational model in the area of tree automata theory. In this paper, the string generating capacities of fsts' and their subclasses are studied. First, it is shown that the class of string languages generated by deterministic fsts' equals to that of parallel multiple context-free grammars, which are an extension of context-free grammars. As a corollary, it can be concluded that the recognition problem for a deterministic fsts is solvable in O(ne1)-time, where n is the length of an input word and e is a constant called the degree of the deterministic fsts'. In contrast to the latter fact, it is also shown that nondeterministic monadic fsts' with state-bound 2 can generate an NP-complete language.

This paper proposes a new type of transfer system, called Similarity-driven Transfer System (or SimTran), which uses an example-based approach to the transfer phase of MT. In this paper, we describe a method for calculating similarity, a method for searching the most appropriate set of translation rules, and a method for constructing an output structure from those selected rules. Further, we show that SimTran can use not only translation examples but also syntax-based translation rules used in conventional transfer systems at the same time.

This paper presents a method of translating natural language specifications of communication protocols into algebraic specifications. Such a natural language specification specifies action sequences performed by the protocol machine (program). Usually, a sentence implicitly specifies the state of the protocol machine at which the described actions must be performed. The authors propose a method of analyzing the implicitly specified states of the protocol machine taking the OSI session protocol specification (265 sentences) as an example. The method uses the following properties: (a) syntactic properties of a natural language (English in this paper); (b) syntactic properties introduced by the target algebraic specifications, e.g., type constraints; (c) properties specific to the target domain, e.g., properties of data types. This paper also shows the result of applying this method to the main part of the OSI session protocol specification (29 paragraphs, 98 sentences). For 95 sentences, the translation system uniquely determines the states specified implicitly by these sentences, using only (a) and (b) described above. By using (c) in addition, each implicitly specified state in the remaining three sentences is uniquely determined.

String grammars (languages) have been extensively studied from 60's. On the other hand, the transformational grammar, proposed by Chomsky, contains the transformation from the set of derivation trees of context-free language to the surface set. And the grammar regarded a tree as an input sentence to some transducer. After that from latter half of 60's, the studies of acceptor, transducer, and so on, whose input is a tree, have been done extensively. In this paper we propose, as a model, a new type of transducer which translates trees into trees and investigate its fundamental properties. The model proposed here is the pushdown tree transducer (for shortly PDTT) that is an extension of the finite state tree transducer discussed by J. W. Thacher, W. C. Rounds, J. Engelfriet, and so on. The main subjects discussed here (we consider only top-down case (t-PDTT)), are as follows: (1) final state t-PDTT translation is equivalent to empty stack t-PDTT translation and vice versa, (2) for any t-PDTT, a single state t-PDTT which is equivalent to it always exists, (3) as a standard form the symmetric stack form t-PDTT is proposed and based on this, it is shown that any single state t-PDTT can be always converted into a linear stack t-PDTT, and so on.

A unification-based Japanese parser has been implemented for an experimental Japanese-to-English spoken language translation system (SL-TRANS). The parser consists of a unification-based spoken-style Japanese grammar and an active chart parser. The grammar handles the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic constraints in an integrated fashion using HPSG-based framework in order to cope with speech recognition errors. The parser takes multiple sentential candidates from the HMM-LR speech recognizer, and produces a semantic representation associated with the best scoring parse based on acoustic and linguistic plausibility. The unification-based parser has been tested using 12 dialogues in the conference registration domain, which include 261 sentences uttered by one male speaker. The sentence recognition accuracy of the underlying speech recognizer is 73.6% for the top candidate, and 83.5% for the top three candidates, where the test-set perplexity of the CFG grammar is 65. By ruling out erroneous speech recognition results using various linguistic constraints, the parser improves the sentence recognition accuracy up to 81.6% for the top candidate, and 85.8% for the top three candidates. From the experiment result, we found that the combination of syntactic restriction, selectional restriction and coordinate structure restriction can provide a sufficient restriction to rule out the recognition errors between case-marking particles with the same vowel, which are the type of errors most likely to occur. However, we also found that it is necessary to use pragmatic information, such as topic, presupposition, and discourse structure, to rule out the recognition errors involved with topicalizing particles and sentence final particles.

In this paper, we present an automatic implementation method by which executable communication programs in C can be generated from protocol specifications in LOTOS. The implementation method consists of two parts: 1) An implementation strategy and 2) a set of translation rules. The first part consists of the basic ideas on how to realize the primary mechanisms in LOTOS specifications. The second part formulates the implementation method by way of the translation rules based on the implementation strategy. The characteristics of our method can be summarized as follows: We formulate our implementation method by way of translation rules. These rules are defined topdown in the form of syntax-directed translation function. The mechanism for controlling concurrency and communication among the user processes corresponding to the processes in LOTOS specification is easily realized by using UNIX operating system functions. The translation rules have been implemented on the AS 3000 (SUN3) workstation. An application of this implementation method is demonstrated by a simplified token-ring-protocol.

This paper deals with the problem of translating Japanese adnominal particles into English according to the idea of Example-Based Machine Translation (EBMT) proposed by Nagao. Japanese adnominal particles are important because: (1) they are frequent function words; (2) to translate them into English is difficult because their translations are diversified; (3) EBMT's effectiveness for adnominal particles suggests that EBMT is effective for other function words, e. g., prepositions of European languages. In EBMT, (1) a database which consists of examples (pairs of a source language expression and its target language translation) is prepared as knowledge for translation; (2) an example whose source expression is similar to the input phrase or sentence is retrieved from the example database; (3) by replacements of corresponding words in the target expression of the retrieved example, the translation is obtained. The similarity in EBMT is computed by the summation of the distance between words multiplied by the weight of each word. The authors' method differs from preceding research in two important points: (1) the authors utilize a general thesaurus to compute the distance between words; (2) the authors propose a weight which changes for every input. The feasibility of our approach has been proven through experiments concerning success rate.

Recently much attention has been devoted to the problem of translating a set of geometrical objects in a given direction, one at a time, without allowing collisions between the objects. This paper studies the translation problem in three dimensions on a set of c-oriented faces", that is, the faces whose bounding edges have a constant number c of orientations. We solve the problem in O(N log2 NK) time and O(N log N) space, where N is the total number of edges of the faces and K is the number of edge intersections in the projection plane. As an intermediate step, we also solve a problem related to ray-shooting. The algorithm for translating c-oriented faces finds uses in computer graphic systems.

This paper describes the future perspective of automatic telephone interpretation using a multimedia intelligent communication network. The need for language interpretation over a telecommunication system creates a strong drive toward integrating information modalities for voice, image, data, computation and conferencing into modern systems using the capability of language interpretation. An automatic telephone interpretation system will solve the problems of language differences in international human-to-human communication. The future prospective of advanced multimedia language communication will be stated as the versatile application of an integrated intelligent network.