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International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Develoment for Africa

ICT4DA 2017: Information and Communication Technology for Development for Africa pp 209–218Cite as

Minimal Dependency Translation: A Framework for Computer-Assisted Translation for Under-Resourced Languages

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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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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the figures, heads are enclosed in brackets.

  2. 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. 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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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Michael Gasser

Authors
  1. Michael Gasser
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Correspondence to Michael Gasser .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Pretoria, South Africa

    Fisseha Mekuria

  2. Information Technology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Ethiopia Enideg Nigussie

  3. Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany

    Waltenegus Dargie

  4. Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland

    Mutafugwa Edward

  5. Bahir Dar Institute of Technology, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

    Tesfa Tegegne

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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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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-95152-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-95153-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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