French English Translation

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French / English Translation

• by Sharon Ulery

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Purpose

• computational linguistics
• to serve students of French or English those
  who only know one of these
• translate French to English and English to French
  well enough to be understandable
• Even a less than perfect translation is useful
• for basic understanding
• for students to check their writing

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Scope

• Iterative form
• Ideal all grammatical utterances Unachievable
• Baseline- word-for-word translation, no agreement
  or conjugation
• Expansion is based upon data entry

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Similar Projects

• Various levels of sophistication
• Web-based free automatic translation
• Software packages for profit
• Human translation
• Can a computer do better than a human?

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Theory NLP Techniques

• Rules- based
• Not robust
• Grammatical v. ungrammatical utterances
• What it does, it does correctly
• Easier to code
• Requires extensive data entry

• Statistical analysis
• Robust
• How people really talk
• Dependant on corpus
• More sophisticated, harder to code
• Requires more extensive comp sci background

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Algorithms

• Java, bilingual mini dictionary
• French v. English versions
• classes Word and Driver
• methods
• determineContent()?
• determineStem()?
• determinePOS()?
• determineGender()?
• determineLang()?
• determineNumber()?
• determineVerbType()?

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Testing

• Structural testing
• Ongoing
• After each new method
• After making improvements to existing methods
• Checks that algorithms work as expected

• Random testing
• Periodically
• Later in development process
• Catches what structural testing misses
• Shows if new algorithms are needed

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Results

• Word-for-word translation
• No agreement/conjugation
• Stores information in each field
• Determines everything in dictionary
• Determines stem
• Mechanics ignores punctuation, etc.
• Can display information about each field for each
  word