Design and Implementation of English To Yor\`ub\'a Verb Phrase Machine Translation System

TL;DR

This paper presents a system for translating English verb phrases into Yoruba, utilizing lexical matching, context-free grammar, and finite automata, with evaluation showing superior performance over sampled Google translations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel English-to-Yoruba verb phrase translation system using formal grammar and automata, with validation through human evaluation.

Findings

System achieved over 70% match with expert scores.

Outperformed sampled Google translations in accuracy.

Validated the approach with finite state automata.

Abstract

We aim to develop an English-to-Yoruba machine translation system which can translate English verb phrase text to its Yoruba equivalent.Words from both languages Source Language and Target Language were collected for the verb phrase group in the home domain. The lexical translation is done by assigning values of the matching word in the dictionary. The syntax of the two languages was realized using Context-Free Grammar, we validated the rewrite rules with finite state automata. The human evaluation method was used and expert fluency was scored. The evaluation shows the system performed better than that of sampled Google translation with over 70 percent of the response matching that of the system's output.