Rapid development of new language pairs at SYSTRAN
Sylvain Surcin, Elke Lange, Jean Sénellart · 2007
One of the mottos of pure statistical MT system promoters is that it is possible to “build a new language pair ” overnight, but the de-velopment of a new language pair for a proficient rule-based translator requires a great amount of effort in linguistic rules and re-sources description. Therefore, we are interested in rapid development techniques for rule-based systems. In this paper, we present the work that was conducted at SYSTRAN during the past year: we successfully developed 12 new language pairs in one year. This led us to shift some architecture paradigms in our translators, to expand implementations with the notion of Linguistic Families, to open our interfaces to more readable formats, and to design ways to work with fully multisource / multitarget aligned dictionaries in order to save time, in particular with the coding effort.