An open-source shallow-transfer machine translation engine for the Romance languages of Spain

Abstract

We present the current status of development of an open-source shallow-transfer machine translation engine for the Romance languages of Spain (the main ones being Spanish, Catalan and Galician) as part of a larger government-funded project which includes non-Romance languages such as Basque and involving both universities and linguistic technology companies. The machine translation architecture uses finite-state transducers for lexical processing, hidden Markov models for part-of-speech tagging, and finite-state based chunking for structural transfer, and is largely based upon that of systems already developed by the Transducens group at the Universitat d'Alacant, such as interNOSTRUM (Spanish—Catalan) and Traductor Universia (Spanish—Portuguese). The possible scope of the project, however, is wider, since it will be possible to use the resulting machine translation system with new pairs of languages; to that end, the project also aims at proposing standard formats to encode the linguistic data needed. This paper briefly describes the machine translation engine, the formats it uses for linguistic data, and the compilers that convert these data into an efficient format used by the engine.Work funded by projects FIT-340101-2004-3 (Spanish Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism) and TIC2003-08681-C02-01 (Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology). Felipe Sánchez-Martínez is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education and the European Social Fund through grant BES-2004-4711