A generic framework for Arabic to English machine ... - Acsu Buffalo

the system capability to deal with a large number of structure variations, it becomes sig-
nificantly more powerful since each structure represents all possible sentences of that
structure regardless of the specific words included. This is a significant point, since vo-
cabulary is easy to develop, but structure requires much more effort.
The major challenge we faced was to use RRG within a machine translation system.
UniArab is the first MT system that uses RRG.In the Arabic linguistic tradition there is
not a clear-cut, well-defined analysis of the inventory of parts of speech in Arabic. We
found that the existent classifications were not suitable, and so we had to create a clas-
sification that made sense for RRG-based translation. We were able to extract logical
structures that made sense from natural Arabic. And we were also able to generate En-
glish translations from this logical structure.
Some specific challenges included dealing with the absence of the copula verb, ‘to be’,
in Arabic. To solve this, we had to look at some Arabic sentence which do not contain
verbs, and correctly deduce how to extract the copula. Free word order was another chal-
lenge due to its widespread presence in Arabic, and this was solved by detailed analysis
of the source language and incorporating this in the logical structure.
We have discoverd that RRG is a realistic basis for machine translation systems. The
use of a sentence’s logical structure to create translations is robust and gives high quality
translations which can deal with some of the challenges of languages like Arabic.
Our work has contributed the first machine translation system based on RRG, which
we have used to prove its effectiveness for MT. This was a major challenge as we had
little work to refer to. We have also advanced work on Arabic language classification,
130