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

4.2.5 Syntactic analysis (Parsing)
4.3. BASIC MACHINE TRANSLATION STRATEGIES
Syntactic analysis, or parsing, is a major component in a rule-based MT system. It is the
process by which a sentence is dissected or analysed into constituent parts, to determine
grammatical structure. One of the key challenges in analysis is dealing with ambiguity.
One approach is what is called depth-first parsing, in which each possible solution is pur-
sued to its conclusion. Each time a solution is found to be wrong, the system backtracks
and takes another route until it eventually finds the correct categorisation of a word. In
breadth-first parsing, alternatives are evaluated in parallel, until each alternative is found
to be wrong except the right one.
4.3 Basic machine translation strategies
Traditionally three different approaches to MT have been used: direct translation, inter-
lingua translation and transfer based translation. A few new approaches have also been
established. In this section we will discuss basic strategies of MT systems.
4.3.1 Multilingual versus bilingual systems
Bilingual systems translate between a single pair of languages; multilingual systems
translate between more than two languages. Bilingual systems are uni-directional or
bi-directional, they may be designed to translate from one language to another in one
direction only, or they are able to translate from both members of a language pair. As a
further modification we may differentiate between reversible bilingual systems and non-
reversible systems. In a reversible bilingual system the process involved in the analysis
of a language can be inverted without change for the generation of output in the same
language.
50