Earley-based structural transfer for Apertium

From Apertium
Revision as of 21:21, 2 October 2013 by Francis Tyers (talk | contribs) (→‎Open questions)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Perhaps 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[edit]

  • 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.
The English → Urdu translation system linked here seems to use LFG and Earley-based parsing.
  • In case there is more than one parse of a sentence, there should be a way to select the most likely.

Existing parsers[edit]

Main article: Parsers

Current free-software parsers which might be worth looking at:

Further reading[edit]

This paper proposes the use of "pattern-based" context-free grammars as a basis for building machine translation (MT) systems.