NP tree matching for English-Chinese translation of patent titles

This paper proposes a method of NP tree matching to realize the translation of English-Chinese patent titles. Firstly a bilingual example database for patent titles is built. English parse trees are produced by English parser, forming NP tree database. The input patent title to be translated is firstly parsed into a tree. Then NP trees are searched for which match with the input NP tree in NP tree database. If similar NP trees exist, HowNet is used to find the best NP tree by calculating word semantic similarity. Final translations are obtained through calculating cohesion of candidate words. If there are no similar NP trees, subtrees that match the input NP tree are searched for and translations generate by subtree substitutions recursively. Experimental results show that our method outperforms a baseline Pharaoh, by using BLEU evaluation system.