DOST to fund CCS' P 5 million Machine Translation Project
De La Salle University
Faculty members of the College of Computer Studies Software Technology Department will receive a five million peso fund for their proposed Hybrid Machine Translation Program. The Philippine Council for Advanced Science and Technology Research and Development (PCASTRD) of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) formally approved their proposal last November 2004.
Led by Associate Professor Rachel Edita Roxas, the project seeks to create a software that can translate texts in the English language to Filipino and vice-versa. Roxas is the program leader and pricipal author of the research. She oversees the program's various projects that are facilitated by Assistant Professors Allan Borra, Charibeth Cheng, Nathalie Rose Lim, Michelle Wendy Tan, and Ethel Ong.
To complete the software, they will make use of a hybrid approach to translation by combining different translation paradigms or techniques. They will also use different techniques or algorithms in Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Systems, and Computational Linguistics.
The program is composed of six concurrent projects that will lead to the creation of a full-scale Machine Translation system. The first three projects involve the development of a Bilingual English-Filipino Lexicon; Automatic Part-of-speech Tagger for English and Filipino; and Morphological Analyzer and Generator for English and Filipino.
The other three projects are the different "engines" for automatic translations: Transfer-based Machine Translator using Lexical Functional Grammar; Example-based Machine Translation; and Template-Based Machine Translation. Outputs from these different engines will be combined to produce the translation with the best result.
An initial budget of P 2,004,405 will be released for the project's first year of implementation. Subsequent releases of the budget will be based on the output of the first or previous year.
