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

8.1. THESIS SUMMARY
and so we hope our work will be the beginning of more work in this arena. We believe
this serves as an excellent foundation for further research in the area.
While statistical machine translation has been promoted by many, we believe that lan-
gauges, expecially rich languages like Arabic, are very organised and structural, and
such approaches cannot correctly deal with the wide variety of sentence structures. When
these systems cannot deal with simplex sentences, as we have shown in Chapter 7, how
do we expect them to correctly translate whole paragraphs? In our approach, we expect
that high quality translations of simplex sentences are the only basis which can build to
good translations of whole paragraphs. The results we have presented are the first step
in applying RRG to sophisticated translation. By focussing in this initial stage on the
basics, we build a more solid foundation for the next stage.
8.1 Thesis summary
In Chapter 2, we presented a summary overview of the grammatical structure of the Ara-
bic language. We detailed various sentence structures as well as unique word attributes
like gender rules applied to all words and duality in number. We discussed how some of
these properties could be used to extract information about sentence structure.
In Chapter 3, we presented the Role and Reference Grammar model, and showed how it
could be used to deduce the logical structure of sentences and produce a lexical represen-
tation which could be used as the interlingua.
In Chapter 4, we presented various approaches to machine translation. We compared
direct translation, transfer systems and interlingua systems and showed how interlingua
systems require significantly more effort in the analysis and generation stages, but have
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