English to Tamil machine translation system using universal networking language

Abstract

This paper proposes English to Tamil machine translation system, using the universal networking language (UNL) as the intermediate representation. The UNL approach is a hybrid approach of the rule and knowledge-based approaches to machine translation. UNL is a declarative formal language, specifically designed to represent semantic data extracted from a natural language text. The input English sentence is converted to UNL (enconversion), which is then converted to a Tamil sentence (deconversion) by ensuring that the meaning of the input sentence is preserved. The representation of UNL was modified to suit the translation process. A new sentence formation algorithm was also proposed to rearrange the translated Tamil words to sentences. The translation system was evaluated using bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) score. A BLEU score of 0.581 was achieved, which is an indication that most of the information in the input sentence is retained in the translated sentence. The scores obtained using the UNL based approach were compared with existing approaches to translation, and it can be concluded that the UNL is a more suited approach to machine translation.