Parsing and translating natural language sentences automatically

A machine for parsing a sentence of a natural language, comprising:

• a coder defining a set of coded tags each corresponding to a respective part-of-speech of a word in a sentence of the language;
• a corpus-based statistical tool having statistical parameters determined from a corpus of sentence dependency structures formed by annotating with the corresponding coded tags the words in each sentence of a set of sentences having respective exemplary dependency structures;
• a tagger for tagging the words of a sentence to be parsed with the corresponding coded tags to obtain a sequence of coded tags representing the input sentence;
• a processor for applying the corpus-based statistical tool to the sequence of coded tags to derive therefrom the most probable dependency structure for the input sentence and to generate a dependency parse tree of the sentence from the derived dependency structure and the words of the input sentence.

A method of automatically translating a first natural language into a second language, comprising the steps of:

• converting a spoken or written text in the first language into electrical signals representing the spoken or written words;
• rendering the text into sentences;
• processing each sentence by an automatic parsing method to generate a dependency parse tree for the sentence by defining a set of coded tags each corresponding to a respective part-of-speech of a word in a sentence of the language;
• building a corpus of sentence dependency structures by annotating with the corresponding coded tags the words in each sentence of a set of sentences having respective exemplary dependency structures to obtain a set of sequences of coded tags representing the dependency structures;
• determining the statistical parameters of a corpus-based statistical tool from the corpus of sentence dependency structures;
• tagging the words of an input sentence to be parsed with the corresponding coded tags to obtain a sequence of coded tags representing the input sequence;
• applying the corpus-based statistical tool to the sequence of coded tags to derive therefrom the most probable dependency structure for the input sentence;
• and generating a dependency parse tree of the sentence from the derived dependency structure and the words of the input sentence;
• synthesizing a sentence in a second language based on the words and the derived dependency tree of the sentence in the first language;
• and
• audibly or visually reproducing a synthesized sentence in the second language.

An apparatus for automatically translating a first natural language into a second language, comprising:

• a converter for converting a spoken or written text in the first language into electrical signals representing the spoken or written words;
• a means for rendering the text into sentences;
• an automatic parsing machine for processing each sentence to generate a dependency parse tree for the sentence comprising a coder defining a set of coded tags each corresponding to a respective part-of-speech of a word in a sentence of the language;
• a corpus-based statistical tool having statistical parameters determined from a corpus of sentence dependency structures formed by annotating with the corresponding coded tags the words in each sentence of a set of sentences having respective exemplary dependency structures;
• a tagger for tagging the words of a sentence to be parsed with the corresponding coded tags to obtain a sequence of coded tags representing the input sentence;
• a processor for applying the corpus-based statistical tool to the sequence of coded tags to derive therefrom the most probable dependency structure for the input sentence and to generate a dependency parse tree of the sentence from the derived dependency structure and the words of the input sentence;
• a synthesizer for synthesizing a sentence in the second language based on the words and the derived dependency tree of the sentence in the first language;
• and
• a reproduction device for audibly or visually reproducing the synthesized sentence in the second language.