Development of Telugu-Tamil transfer-based machine translation system: An improvization using divergence index

Abstract

Building an automatic, high-quality, robust machine translation (MT) system is a fascinating yet an arduous task, as one of the major difficulties lies in cross-linguistic differences or divergences between languages at various levels. The existence of translation divergence precludes straightforward mapping in the MT system. An increase in the number of divergences also increases the complexity, especially in linguistically motivated transfer-based MT systems. This paper discusses the development of Telugu-Tamil transfer-based MT and how a divergence index (DI) is built to quantify the number of parametric variations between languages in order to improve the success rate of MT. The DI facilitates MT in proposing where to put efforts for the given language pair to attain better and faster results. In addition, handling strategies of different types of divergences in a transfer-based approach to MT are discussed. The paper also includes the evaluation method and how an improvization takes place with the application of DI in MT.