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Browsing by Author "Healy, Sean Patrick"

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  • A Design Proposal for a French-Finnish Translation System
    Publication . Healy, Sean Patrick; Cardey, Sylviane; Greefield, Peter; Baptista, Jorge
    This thesis proposes a machine translation system from French to Finnish. A practical application was built as part of an existing machine translation system, the LiSe Project, using a controlled version of the language for automatic translation in emergency situations. This added an agglutinating language to the inflecting and isolating languages already represented in the LiSe system. The proposed system is based on SyGuLAC theory (Systemic Grammar using a Linguistically Motivated Algebra and Calculus), according to which, tasks involving language can be broken down into a series of separate but interrelated microsystems. The phonology, morphology, and case for grammatical objects of transitive verbs of Finnish are summarized, in order to familiarize the reader with some of the concepts required for proper understanding of the algorithms. The micro-systems proposed for this system are then individually explained. Due to time constraints, a standalone program was implemented that did not need to be fully integrated into the rest of the LiSe system. Fifty randomly generated and screened sentences were tested and scored in Google’s translator and in LiSe, each sentence rated as “good” (3), “acceptable” (2), “incorrect” (1), or “nonsense” (0). Google’s average score was 0.94, with 12 sentences rated acceptable or better. The micro-system approach proposed in this thesis had an average score of 2.4, with 42 sentences rated acceptable or better. This suggests that the micro-system approach in general, and the LiSe Project in particular, can provide reliable machine translation between such typologically different languages as French and Finnish.
    2011Master thesis Restricted access Show more