ScaleMT

Introduction

This is the wiki page of ScaleMT, a scalable architecture to provide translation web services based on Apertium and other machine translation engines. It is based on previous works to develop an Apertium web service: Apertium_scalable_service. The web service has two different APIs: XML-RPC, a lightweight remote procedure call method using XML and HTTP, and JSON REST, that allows you to easily use the service from any website.

Architecture

ScaleMT makes the translation engines more efficient by turning them into daemons (that is, processes running in the background rather than under the interaction of a user). Besides that, it is able to run on multiple servers thanks to an algorithm which decides which daemons should run on each server and a load balancing method that decides which server should process each request. ScaleMT consists of two main Java applications:

• ScaleMTSlave runs on a machine with the translation engine installed and manages a set of running translation engine instances (daemons); it performs the requested translations by sending them to the right daemon.
• ScaleMTRouter (request router) runs on a web server; it processes the translation requests and sends them to the right ScaleMTSlave instance.

References

• "ScaleMT: a free/open-source framework for building scalable machine translation web services". Víctor M. Sánchez-Cartagena, Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz. Open Source Tools for Machine Translation, MT Marathon 2010, Dublin, Ireland, 2010. The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 93, p. 97-106. [pdf]
• "An open-source highly scalable web service architecture for the Apertium machine translation engine". Víctor M. Sánchez-Cartagena, Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz. First International Workshop on Free/Open-Source Rule-Based Machine Translation, Alicante, Spain, 2009, p. 51-58. [pdf]