Sefer Kurnaz


2018

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Rule-based machine translation from Kazakh to Turkish
Sevilay Bayatli | Sefer Kurnaz | Ilnar Salimzyanov | Jonathan Washington | Francis M. Tyers
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

This paper presents a shallow-transfer machine translation (MT) system for translating from Kazakh to Turkish. Background on the differences between the languages is presented, followed by how the system was designed to handle some of these differences. The system is based on the Apertium free/open-source machine translation platform. The structure of the system and how it works is described, along with an evaluation against two competing systems. Linguistic components were developed, including a Kazakh-Turkish bilingual dictionary, Constraint Grammar disambiguation rules, lexical selection rules, and structural transfer rules. With many known issues yet to be addressed, our RBMT system has reached performance comparable to publicly-available corpus-based MT systems between the languages.