InterlinguaPlus Machine Translation Approach for Local Languages: Ekegusii and Swahili

Abstract

This paper elucidates the InterlinguaPlus design and its application in bi-directional text translations between Ekegusii and Kiswahili languages unlike the traditional translation pairs, one-by-one. Therefore, any of the languages can be the source or target language. The first section is an overview of the project, which is followed by a brief review of Machine Translation. The next section discusses the implementation of the system using Carabao's open machine translation framework and the results obtained. So far, the translation results have been plausible particularly for the resource-scarce local languages and clearly affirm morphological similarities inherent in Bantu languages.

Grammar Engineering for the Ekegusii Language in Grammatical Framework

“…The keyword oper is usually of the form: One name can be used for different paradigms in the same category through operation overload Some Bantu language grammars have been developed in GF, mainly: Kikamba [15], Swahili [16] and Runyankore and Rukiga [17]. Furthermore, Ekegusii has other language resources such as an Interlingua rule-based machine translation between Swahili and Ekegusii [18] and morphology analyzer [19], An online dictionary, little parallel corpus (some bible segments) and some monolingual corpus [20]. The above survey demonstrates that little work has been done to develop NLP tools and resources for this language; hence, this computational grammar will be a significant effort.…”

Grammar Engineering for the Ekegusii Language in Grammatical Framework

“…The keyword oper is usually of the form: oper function name: function type = function body One name can be used for different paradigms in the same category through operation overload Some Bantu language grammars have been developed in GF, mainly: Kikamba [15], Swahili [16] and Runyankore and Rukiga [17]. Furthermore, Ekegusii has other language resources such as an Interlingua rule-based machine translation between Swahili and Ekegusii [18] and morphology analyzer [19], An online dictionary, little parallel corpus (some bible segments) and some monolingual corpus [20]. The above survey demonstrates that little work has been done to develop NLP tools and resources for this language; hence, this computational grammar will be a significant effort.…”