Dealing with Replicative Words in Hindi for Machine Translation to English

The South Asian languages are well-known for their replicative words. In these languages, words of almost all the grammatical categories can occur in their reduplicative form. Hindi is one such language which is quite rich in having various types of replicative words in its lexicon. The traditional grammars and some of the research works have discussed the topic to some extent, particularly from the point of view of their descriptions and classifications. However, a detailed study of the topic becomes significant in view of the complexity involved in handling of such replicative words in the area of natural language processing, particularly for machine translation. In this paper, we discuss different types of replicative words in Hindi and their syntactic and semantic characteristics to formulate rules and strategies to identify their multiple functions and mapping patterns in English for machine translation from Hindi to English.