apertium-cy (http://www.cymraeg.org.uk) is a rule-based "gisting" machine translation system for Welsh to English, with both engine and data released under the GPL. We summarise the development of apertium-cy, evaluate its output, and discuss the advantages of a collaborative development model combined with rule-based MT for marginalised languages. apertium-cy is a "gisting" machine translation system for Welsh to English, based on the Apertium machine translation platform.¹ e platform was originally aimed at the Romance languages of the Iberian peninsula, but is now being adapted for other languages (such as Basque, and languages from the Celtic group -Welsh, Irish, Breton), with much of the work on new languages being pursued by volunteers, following the increasingly common collaborative development model used for free² and open-source soware. Apertium is licensed under the Free Soware Foundation's GNU General Public License,³ and all the soware and data for the 17 supported language pairs (and the other pairs in development) is available for download from the project website. Apertium follows a shallow-transfer approach, and is very fast. Finite-state transducers (Garrido-Alenda and Forcada, 2002, Roche and Schabes, 1997) processing up to 40,000 words per second are used for lexical processing, first-order hidden Markov models (HMM) are used for part-of-speech tagging, and multi-stage finite-state based chunking for structural transfer.
Previous attempts to create machine translation systems for the Welsh-English language pair are reported in Jones and Eisle (2006) and REF translation software.
apertium-cy - a collaboratively-developed free RBMT system for Welsh to English
Prague Bull. Math. Linguistics
Prague Bull. Math. Linguistics
Computer Science