[PAL-en] RE: Demande d'aide pour le traducteur Francais-Lingala

["Don Osborn" <dzo@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Message from Tunde, with minor changes]

I may be of some help in this regard. A student at the
.Africa.Regional.Centre.for.Information.Science is at present undertaking
Igbo-English machine translation under my supervision and we are both
learning as the project progresses.

So far, we have developed a programme in Prolog that parses an Igbo sentence
into its constituent phrase structure.  Each word in the atomic phrase is
then translated into English using an Igbo-English parallel lexicon and the
English translation is constructed by arranging the equivalent words in each
atomic phrase according to the valid phrase structure of English.  We have
come a long way dealing with such issues of gender agreement, number
agreement, etc.  We are still having problems with homographs and that is
where I think a statistical approach using parallel text becomes useful.

Unfortunately, I do not have any knowledge of Lingala grammar, however, I am
willing to collaborate with others that may be able to provide relevant
grammar knowledge (Lingala and French).  It might be interesting to attempt
a .web-.based collaboration [virtual] on this problem.  I am interested and
willing to offer my Prolog programming skills.

Tunde

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Tunde Adegbola (Ph.D.)
Executive Director
African Languages Technology Initiative
(Alt-I ... Inserting African issues into the agenda of the knowledge age)
www.alt-i.org
 
President
Tiwa Systems Ltd.
 
11 Oluyole Way, New Bodija Ibadan, Nigeria.
+234 8034019398
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