Generate and Repair Machine Translation

We propose Generate and Repair Machine Translation (GRMT), a constraint-based approach to machine translation that focuses on accurate translation output. GRMT performs the translation by generating a Translation Candidate (TC), verifying the syntax and semantics of the TC and repairing the TC when required. GRMT comprises three modules: Analysis Lite Machine Translation (ALMT), Translation Candidate Evaluation (TCE) and Repair and Iterate (RI). The key features of GRMT are simplicity, modularity, extendibility, and multilinguality. An English–Thai translation system has been implemented to illustrate the performance of GRMT. The system has been developed and run under SWI-Prolog 3.2.8. The English and Thai grammars have been developed based on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and implemented on the Attribute Logic Engine (ALE). GRMT was tested to generate the translations for a number of sentences/phrases. Examples are provided throughout the article to illustrate how GRMT performs the translation process.