Experiment on English-Thai Machine Translation via Text Understanding Based on Mental Image Directed Semantic Theory

This paper describes an original methodology for cross-language paraphrase via intermediate semantic expression in a knowledge representation language called Mental-image Description Language $(L_{md)}$ and its application to an experimental system for English-Thai translation. This system interprets English text into $L_{md}$ expression to understand it and interprets the understanding result into Thai text without using any syntactic information of the input English text. That is, the system performs free translation, namely, generates target language texts only from intermediate semantic representations of source language texts. It works as one kind of inter-Iingual machine translation system but actually is a subsystem of our natural language understanding system to paraphrase an input text in another language. Some experimental results were evaluated by several native Thai speakers with good knowledge of English, which gave a good perspective to our future work on this system.