Arabic Machine Translation: A Developmental Perspective
Ali Farghaly · 2010
The field of machine translation has been dominated in the last two decades by statistical and machine learning approaches. Recently, prominent computational linguists (1)-(2)-(3) have expressed misgivings about the exclusive reliance on machine learning approaches to the neglect of the contribution of the symbolic approaches. Furthermore, several machine learning researchers (4)-(5) have recently acknowledged that incorporating linguistic knowledge in their machine learning applications resulted in marked improvement in performance. In this paper, we begin with a brief review of the early attempts at developing machine translation systems and in particular the first English to Arabic machine translation system released in the early eighties. The first generation of machine translation systems followed the direct approach. Part II, is devoted to the rise of the transfer approach in machine translation with an example from the SYSTRAN Arabic to English machine translation system. Part III documents the successes of statistical machine translation systems using the examples of the Language Weaver Arabic-to- English machine translation system and the crowd sourcing Google system. We also talk about the AppTek hybrid approach to machine translation. Part IV concludes the paper. the Second World War for deciphering the German secret code. These cryptographic methods relied heavily on frequencies of letters, combination of letters and letter patterns. He also believed that underlying the statistical regularities of languages, there is a logical and universal foundation which could represent an alternative to translate from one language to another. At the same time with the beginning with the cold war in the 1940s, there was an urgent need for crude machine translation because the United States decided it was essential to scan and interpret every Russian communication coming out of the Soviet Union. However, there weren't enough translators to keep up with the huge volume of Russian books and papers published in the Soviet Bloc at that time. The urgent need to translate Russian into English coincided with the invention of computers. It was not surprising then, that developing Russian to English machine translation systems would be one of the first tasks these miracle machines were set to perform.