Tamil Linguistic Tools and English-Tamil Machine Translation System: Statistical Machine Translation System using Tamil Computational Linguistic Tools

Machine translation is about an automatic conversion of one natural language text to another using computer. This book explains the development of Tamil Linguistic Tools and English-Tamil Machine Translation System. Development of Tamil linguistic tools such as Part-of-Speech Tagger, Morphological Analyzer and Morphological Generator are also explained in detail. Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system treats translation problem as a machine learning problem. Learning algorithms create a model from parallel sentences and using this model, new sentences are translated. Huge amounts of parallel corpora are required for learning the pattern. SMT algorithms are difficult to apply directly for dissimilar language pair like English-Tamil. To resolve this and improve the translation performance an additional morphological pre-processing is required. This pre-processing is performed using Tamil linguistic tools which augment the linguistic information into the parallel corpora. The pre and post processing methodology explained in this book are applicable to other language pairs too.