Abstract
This paper introduces Minimal Dependency Translation (MDT), an ongoing project to develop a rule-based framework for the creation of rudimentary bilingual lexicon-grammars for machine translation and computer-assisted translation into and out of under-resourced languages as well as initial steps towards an implementation of MDT for English-to-Amharic translation. The basic units in MDT, called groups, are headed multi-item sequences. In addition to wordforms, groups may contain lexemes, syntactic-semantic categories, and grammatical features. Each group is associated with one or more translations, each of which is a group in a target language. During translation, constraint satisfaction is used to select a set of source-language groups for the input sentence and to sequence the words in the associated target-language groups.
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- 1.
In the figures, heads are enclosed in brackets.
- 2.
For simplification, Amharic verb lexemes are given in their usual citation form, the third person singular masculine perfect form. In fact they are represented internally in terms of their abstract roots, the sequence of consonants that characterize words in Semitic languages.
- 3.
In fact the system would also generate the (incorrect) feminine of the verb in this case since the group does not include the subject itself: .
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© 2018 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
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Gasser, M. (2018). Minimal Dependency Translation: A Framework for Computer-Assisted Translation for Under-Resourced Languages. In: Mekuria, F., Nigussie, E., Dargie, W., Edward, M., Tegegne, T. (eds) Information and Communication Technology for Development for Africa. ICT4DA 2017. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 244. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95153-9_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95153-9_20
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