An English to Turkish Machine Translation System Using Structural Mapping

An English to Turkish Machine Translation System Using Structural Mapping Cigdem Keyder Turhan Dept. of Computer Engineering Middle East Technical University Ankara 06531, Turkey cigdem@ceng, metu. edu. tr Abstract This paper describes the design and imple- mentation of an English-Turkish machine translation (MT) system developed as a part of the TU-Language project supported by a NATO Science for Stability Project grant. The system uses a structural trans- fer approach in translating the domain of IBM computer manuals. The general de- sign of the translation system and a de- tailed description of the transfer compo- nent is presented in this paper. 1 Introduction The TU-Language project sponsored by the NATO Science for Stability Programme was started in 1994 to establish computational foundations for the natu- ral language processing research on the Turkish lan- guage with the collaboration of the Computer Engi- neering Department of Middle East Technical Uni- versity, the Computer Science Department of Bilkent University and ttalici Computing, Inc. The project attempts to perform extensive research on Turkish which will eventually lead to the development of an English to Turkish machine translation system, Turkish language tutorial system, a Turkish dictio- nary and other software tools to be used in further research. In this paper, some issues in translating from En- glish to Turkish languages, the translation domain, the outline of the machine translation system un- der development, and a detailed description of the transfer component will be presented. 2 Turkish Language Morphology and syntax of Turkish are very differ- ent from English, therefore, the formalism used to represent English texts has to be altered signifi- cantly for Turkish text representation. The Turk- ish language is characterized as a head final lan- guage where the modifier/specifier always precedes the modified/specified. This characteristic also af- fects the word order of the sentences which can be described as SOV where the verb is positioned at the end. Also, when compared to other languages, Turkish relies more on overt case markings which mark the role of the argument in a sentence. The case mark- ings enables Turkish to have a relatively free word- order property where every variation in the word order in a sentence results in a different meaning. In the MT system being developed, these and other different characteristics of the Turkish lan- guage are handled in the transfer and generation components. 3 Translation Domain As more and more computer companies enter the Turkish market, a growing demand for English to Turkish translation of computer manuals has emerged. Other machine translation systems have also chosen the domain of computer manuals for their translation systems because of the relatively unambiguous and narrow sublanguage used (Tsut- sumi, 1986). Also, in his research, Nasukawa (Na- sukawa, 1993) concluded that the statistical anal- ysis of the text in IBM computer manuals showed that 92.6 percent of the words in a computer man- ual are used in the same word sense which would significantly reduce the problem of lexical ambiguity resolution. Another advantage is that the material …

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