Design and implementation of an English to Arabic machine translation (MEANA MT).

A new system for Arabic Machine Translation (called MEANA MT) has
been built. This system is capable of the analysis of English language as
a source and can convert the given sentences into Arabic. The designed
system contains three sets of grammar rules governing the PARSING,
TRANSFORMATION AND GENERATION PHASES. In the system,
word sense ambiguity and some pragmatic patterns were resolved. A
new two-way (Analysis/Generation) computational lexicon system dealing
with the morphological analysis of the Arabic language has been
created. The designed lexicon contains a set of rules governing the morphological
inflection and derivation of Arabic nouns, verbs, verb "to be",
verb "not to be" and pronouns.
The lexicon generates Arabic word forms and their inflectional affixes
such as plural and gender morphemes as well as attached pronouns, each
according to its rules. It can not parse or generate unacceptable word
inflections. This computational system is capable of dealing with vowelized
Arabic words by parsing the vowel marks which are attached to
the letters. Semantic value pairs were developed to show ~he word sense
and other issues in morphology; e.g. genders, numbers and tenses. The
system can parse and generate some pragmatic sentences and phrases like
proper names, titles, acknowledgements, dates, telephone numbers and
addresses. A Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) formalism is used to
combine the syntactic, morphological and semantic features. The grammar
rules of this system were implemented and compiled in COMMON.
LISP based on Tomita's Generalised LR parsing algorithm, augmented
by Pseudo and Full Unification packages.
After parsing, sentence constituents of the English sentence are rep-
_ resented as Feature Structures (F-Structures). These take part in the
transfer and generation process which uses transformation' grammar rules
to change the English F-Structure into Arabic F-Structure. These Arabic
F-Structure features will be suitable for the Arabic generation grammar
to build the required Arabic sentence. This system has been tested on
three domains (sentences and phrases); the first is a selected children's
story, the second semantic sentences and the third domain consists of
pragmatic sentences. This research could be considered as a complete
solution for a personal MT system for small messages and sublanguage
domains.