A Statistical Approach to English-Persian Machine Translation

Abstract

Statistical Machine Translation has successfully been used for translation between many language pairs contributing to its popularity in recent years. It has however not been used for the English/Persian language pair. This paper presents the first such attempt and describes the problems faced in creating a corpus and building a base line system. Our experience with the construction of a parallel corpus during this ongoing study and the problems encountered especially with the process of alignment are discussed in this paper. The prototype constructed and its evaluation using the BiLingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) is briefly described and results are analyzed. In the final part of the paper, conclusions are drawn and work planned for the future is discussed.