NTT Communication Science (CS) Laboratory has developed its own MT system named ALT-JE (Automatic Language Translation - Japanese to English), which was still under development in July 1998.
The system carries out a multi-level translation based on a deep morphological analysis of Japanese. The sentence to be translated is separated into a subjective part (temporal and modal information) and an objective part (the kernel of the sentence). The objective part is translated using the multi-level method, where broad rules are applied first (e.g. the transfer of morphological structure tree), followed by idiomatic expressions, structures found in the semantic structure dictionary, and finally default general rules.
ALT-JE uses the concept hierarchy mentioned in the part
as well as a word dictionary, a list of semantic
common structures and idioms in a dictionary for the transfer of
structures between languages, and a Japanese-English bilingual
dictionary that describes syntax and semantics for each word.
The translation software was planned to be commercialized during the fall of 1998.