Patent ID: 6233544
Filing Date: 2001-05-15
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
A translator for translating a phrase in a source language into a phrase in a target language, comprising:a plurality of head transducers, each head transducer associated with a pair of head words with corresponding meanings in the source and target languages, each head transducer for converting left and right ordered source language sequences of dependents of the source language head word into left and right ordered target language sequences of dependents of the target language head word;a bilingual lexicon that associates each transducer with the pair of head words;a parameter table that provides costs for each action taken by each head transducer;a transduction search engine that generates a plurality of candidate translations of the source language phrase using the head transducers and provides a total cost for each of the candidate translations, wherein the total cost of a translation is the sum of the cost for all actions taken by each transducer involved in the translation; anda target string selector that selects a best translation from the plurality of candidate translations by searching for the translation that has the lowest cost.