Generate and repair machine translation

Abstract

We propose Generate and Repair Machine Translation (GRMT), a constraint-based approach to machine translation that focuses on accurate translation output. GRMT performs the translation by generating a Translation Candidate (TC), verifying the syntax and semantics of the TC and repairing the TC when required. GRMT comprises three modules: Analysis Lite Machine Translation (ALMT), Translation Candidate Evaluation (TCE) and Repair and Iterate (RI). The key features of GRMT are simplicity, modularity, extendibility, and multilinguality. An English-Thai translation system has been implemented to illustrate the performance of GRMT. The system has been developed and run under SWI-Prolog 3.2.8. The English and Thai grammars have been developed based on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and implemented on the Attribute Logic Engine (ALE). GRMT was tested to generate the translations for a number of sentences/phrases. Examples are provided throughout the article to illustrate how GRMT performs the translation process.