Machine Translation
- Portuguese-Danish (live demo)
- Danish-Esperanto (live demo)
- Danish-English (live demo)
In all three projects, our MT strategy relies on a detailed and robust grammatical analysis of the source language (SL) side. The systems' parsers are based on Constraint Grammar technology (PALAVRAS and DanGram, respectively), and produce word based morphological and functional information as well as syntactic tree structures. Semantic disambiguation uses semantic prototype discrimination and valency instantiation. In addition, specific translations or translation patterns are mapped with context dependent CG-rules. The systems differ, however, in their approach to syntactic transfer. Po-Da and Da-Eo use syntactic transformation rules based on tag sequences, while Da-En uses movement rules based on full dependency trees.
The objective of VISL's machine translation is not "perfect translation" (which - if at all possible - would involve a great deal of artificial intelligence and knowledge about the world), but rather to provide a target language (TL) version of the input text which, though in places somewhat ungrammatical, lexically unorthodox or even incomplete, will allow monolingual SL native speakers to understand and sensibly post-edit the text in question.