"Matxin", an open-source rule-based machine translation system for Basque

• Published in: Machine translation Vol. 25; no. 1; pp. 53 - 82
• Main Authors: Mayor, Aingeru, Alegria, Iñaki, de Ilarraza, Arantza Díaz, Labaka, Gorka, Lersundi, Mikel, Sarasola, Kepa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer 01-03-2011; Springer Netherlands
• Subjects: Applied linguistics; Artificial Intelligence; Computational Linguistics; Computer Science; Dictionaries; Language translation; Linguistics; Machine translation; Mayors; Natural Language Processing (NLP); Open source; Postpositions; Prepositions; Syntactics; Translation; Verbs; Words; Open-source; Rule-based machine translation; Reusability; Lesser-used languages; Basque; Spanish as source language; Natural language processing; Computational linguistics; Machine translation; Statistical Analysis
• ISSN: 0922-6567; 1573-0573
• DOI: 10.1007/s10590-011-9092-y

We present the first publicly available machine translation (MT) system for Basque. The fact that Basque is both a morphologically rich and less-resourced language makes the use of statistical approaches difficult, and raises the need to develop a rule-based architecture which can be combined in the future with statistical techniques. The MT architecture proposed reuses several open-source tools and is based on a unique XML format to facilitate the flow between the different modules, which eases the interaction among different developers of tools and resources. The result is the rule-based Matxin MT system, an open-source toolkit, whose first implementation translates from Spanish to Basque. We have performed innovative work on the following tasks: construction of a dependency analyser for Spanish, use of rich linguistic information to translate prepositions and syntactic functions (such as subject and object markers), construction of an efficient module for verbal chunk transfer, and design and implementation of modules for ordering words and phrases, independently of the source language.