Machine translation from Arabic to English and French

Abstract

As the cognitive processes of natural language understanding and generation are better understood, it is becoming easier, nowadays, to perform machine translation. In this paper we present our work on machine translation from Arabic to English and French, and illustrate it with a fully operational system, which runs on PC compatibles with Arabic/Latin interface. This system is an extension of an earlier system, whose task was the analysis of the natural language Arabic. Thanks to the regularity of its phrase structures and word patterns, Arabic lends itself quite naturally to a Fillmore-like analysis. The meaning of a phrase is stored in a star-like data structure, where the verb occupies the center of the star and the various noun sentences occupy specific peripheral nodes of the star. The data structure is then translated into an internal representation in the target language, which is then mapped into the target text.