Two principles and six techniques for rapid MT development
Sergei Nirenburg, Stephen Beale, Stephen Helmreich, Kavi Mahesh, Evelyne Viegas, Rémi Zajac · 1996
In this paper we describe a range of techniques used at NMSU CRL for accelerating the development of MT systems. These techniques enable semi-automatic development of a number of components of a multilingual MT system, thereby enabling rapid deployment of MT capabilities in a new language. First, we describe the core multi-engine, multilingual architecture that enables the different techniques to be rapidly integrated to build an MT system. We show how off-the-shelf components were used in this architecture for fast development. Then we illustrate a set of techniques for semi-automatic acquisition of static resources: (a) automatic induction of grammars, (b) corpus-based acquisition of bilingual glossaries, and automatic acquisition of semantic lexicons through (c) lexical rules and (d) reversal of analysis lexicons to generation lexicons. Finally we describe an automatic testing environment that enables rapid validation of automatically acquired resources. 1 Rapid Development Techniques Static knowledge sources — grammars, lexicons, world knowledge bases — are the most time-consuming concerns in any rule-based machine translation system. It is, therefore, imperative to find ways of speeding up the creation and updating of high-quality, useful static knowledge sources. It is equally imperative to