  Possessive pronouns are used as determiners in English when no equivalent
would be used in a Japanese sentence with the same meaning. This paper proposes
a heuristic method of generating such possessive pronouns even when there is no
equivalent in the Japanese. The method uses information about the use of
possessive pronouns in English treated as a lexical property of nouns, in
addition to contextual information about noun phrase referentiality and the
subject and main verb of the sentence that the noun phrase appears in. The
proposed method has been implemented in NTT Communication Science Laboratories'
Japanese-to-English machine translation system ALT-J/E. In a test set of 6,200
sentences, the proposed method increased the number of noun phrases with
appropriate possessive pronouns generated, by 263 to 609, at the cost of
generating 83 noun phrases with inappropriate possessive pronouns.
