An open-source rule-based machine translation system is developed for Scots, a low-resourced minor language closely related to English and spoken in Scotland and Ireland. By concentrating on translation for assimilation (gist comprehension) from Scots to English, it is proposed that the development of dictionaries designed to be used with in the Apertium platform will be sufficient to produce translations that improve non-Scots speakers understanding of the language. Mono- and bilingual Scots dictionaries are constructed using lexical items gathered from a variety of resources across several domains. Although the primary goal of this project is translation for gisting, the system is evaluated for both assimilation and dissemination (publication-ready translations). A variety of evaluation methods are used, including a cloze test undertaken by human volunteers. While evaluation results are comparable to, and in some cases superior to, those of other language pairs within the Apertium platform, room for improvement is identified in several areas of the system.
@InProceedings{ABERCROMBIE16.83,
author = {Gavin Abercrombie}, title = {A Rule-based Shallow-transfer Machine Translation System for Scots and English}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper