LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 20:4 April 2020
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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A TRANSFER GRAMMAR FOR ENGLISH-TAMIL MACHINE TRANSLATION

Prof. Rajendran Sankaravelayuthan
Dr. P. Kumaresan

This monograph has seven chapters:

Chapter 1: Introduction 13-20
Chapter 2: Syntacitc Structure of English 21-77
Chapter 3: Syntactic Structure of Tamil 78-143
Chapter 4: Grammatical Formalisms and Syntactic Parsing 144-176
Chapter 5: Machine Translation System 177-195
Chapter – 6: Transfer Grammar for English to Tamil Machine Translation 196-249
Chapter -7: Conclusion 250-253
Bibliography 254

The concept of transfer grammar is not a recent phenomenon. Even in 1954 Harris discusses about the importance transfer grammar in the context of translation, machine translation, language teaching and language learning. We became aware of it recently due to our involvement in machine translation (MT). Presently we are interested in preparing a transfer grammar for English Tamil MT. Harris has proposed an elaborate methodology to prepare a transfer grammar (His idea of transfer grammar has been explained below under the heading “Transfer Grammar”. Here we narrow down our efforts just to correlate syntactic structure of English with that of Tamil from the point of view preparing a transfer grammar for English-Tamil machine translation. For this purpose the computable syntactic structures of English and Tamil have been worked out. These computational syntactic structure analyses are different form ordinary syntactic structure analyses in the sense that the computational syntactic structures are viable for computational processing. A transfer grammar for machine translation has to be prepared using these computational syntactic structure analyses. A transfer grammar is an important component in a machine translation system. This helps us to map one language structure into another language structure.

As English and Tamil belongs to two different types of language groups, that is English as predominantly SVO patterned language and Tamil a predominantly SOV patterned language showing unique characteristics which differentiate them drastically from one another, it is possible to manipulate these differences to form transfer rules. These transfer rules can be used to map the English structure into Tamil Structure and vice versa.

The computationally viable syntactic structures of English and Tamil are worked out to facilitate the matching of the two types of structures in order to formulate transfer grammar (transfer rules). The transfer grammar is the core of the present research. Transfer grammar component it is very crucial for developing a machine translation system. For this purpose English corpus, especially on tourism, has been downloaded from internet. In the present scenario machine translation systems are produced by preparing parallel corpora of the source and target languages and by making use of statistical methods. The corpus is at first manually annotated for various grammatical features and by using this training corpus rest of the corpus will be automatically annotated. By statistical method and by making use of parallel corpora the transition is executed between the source and target languages. For this purpose the transfer of source language into target language is crucial. This is done by making use of a transfer grammar, which helps in transferring the lexical and structural elements of source language text into target language text. Nearly 5000 sentences in the tourism domain have been collected and translated into Tamil. The translation is a source language faithful translation. As for possible the information in the source text are not disturbed much. This helps in facilitate the preparation of transfer grammar. Impotence is given for the development of transfer rules.

In order to prepare a Machine Translation system for translating English texts into Tamil, we need to know the common and contrasting features of English and Tamil. The study which covers up both the aspects of commonness and contrasting feature are referred here as correlative study. The correlative study has to be made at least from the point of view of lexicon and constituent structure. The correlative study of the vocabulary (lexicon) of both the languages is needed for the sake of lexical transfer. The problem has been tackled in the English-Tamil bilingual dictionary and Tamil generation dictionary. We have to concentrate on the constituent structure of the two languages focusing our attention on syntax. Inflectional morphology is taken care of by morphological analysis. Chomsky defined a grammar of a language as a description of the ideal speaker hearers’ intrinsic competence. The set of rules, which describes the structure of the sentences of a language are internalized by every speaker of a language and that gives him the competence to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical sentence. A native speaker of a language will be able to tell whether a string is deviant because of its meaning (its semantic interpretation) or because of it’s from (its syntax). Each language has a stock of meaning bearing elements and these elements are combined to express different meanings. The following two English sentences Raju called Ramu and Ramu called Raju consist the same meaning bearing elements, but they indicate two different meaning because the words are combined differently in them. These different combinations fall in the realm of syntax.

This is only the beginning part of the MONOGRAPH. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE MONOGRAPH IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Prof. Rajendran Sankaravelayuthan
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetam University
Coimbatore 641 112
Tamilnadu, India
rajushush@gmail.com

Dr. P. Kumaresan
Assistant Professor
SRM Trichy Arts and Science College, Tiruchirappalli
Tamilnadu, India
drpkenglish@gmail.com
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