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

TL;DR

This paper presents Minimal Dependency Translation, a rule-based framework designed to facilitate basic machine and computer-assisted translation for under-resourced languages, demonstrated through English-Amharic translation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel rule-based framework with group units for creating bilingual lexicon-grammars tailored for under-resourced languages.

Findings

Developed initial MDT implementation for English-Amharic translation.

Demonstrated the framework's ability to handle syntactic and semantic variations.

Showed potential for improving translation in low-resource language contexts.

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.