Earley-based structural transfer for Apertium
Perhaps [Earley's algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earley's_algorithm] to parse context-free grammars (which has a left-to-right longest-match philosophy as Apertium) could be used to perform more complex syntactical transformations; this could be useful for distant language pairs containing embedded structures.
Open questions:
- Currently, Apertium uses text streams to communicate. I assume this would not be possible here.
- When would one call the bilingual dictionary? Apertium Level 2 calls it in the first stage.
- We should check whether this has been done before.
Further reading
- This paper proposes the use of "pattern-based" context-free grammars as a basis for building machine translation (MT) systems.
- Randall Sharp and Oliver Streiter Simplifying the Complexity of Machine Translation
