2. A Parser for Sinhala Language First Step Towards English to Sinhala Machine Translation
Budditha Hettige
Department of Statistics and Computer Science, Faculty of Applied Science,
University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka.
&
Asoka S. Karunananda
Faculty of Information Technology, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.

3. Introduction Problem Machine Translation Design Implementation
Parser in action
Further work

4. Problem- Language barrier
Machine translation has been a potential solution for giving access to the world knowledge available in English for those who have different mother tongues
English to Sinhala Machine Translation system is not yet available
Other existing Machine Translation System could not be directly used

5. Machine Translation
Machine Translation is a translation System, that translate one language to other
Some Machine Translation systems
Anusaaraka, Mantra etc. for Indian Languages
EDR for English to Japanese translation
Complexity of the Machine Translation
Language Structure
Sentence disambiguation

6. Machine Translation Source sentence Target language sentence
Source language Morphological Analyzer
Source language parser
Bilingual dictionary
Target language Morphological generator
Target language parser
Target language sentence

7. Source language parser
Machine Translation
I eat rice
Source language Morphological Analyzer
I – Noun, 1st person, Singular, male
eat - verb, present tense
rice - noun,3rd person, Singular
noun(I)
verb(eat)
noun(rice)
Source language parser
Subject(I)
verb(eat)
Object(rice)
I eat rice
Noun
(SUB) i Vp Np
Verb
(VEB)
eat
(OBJ)
rice

8. Target language Morphological generator Target language parser
Machine Translation
Bilingual dictionary
noun(I)
verb(eat)
noun(rice)
noun(uu)
verb(lkjd)**
noun(n;a)
Target language Morphological generator
noun(uu)
verb(lkjd)
noun(n;a)
verb(lñ)
Target language parser
noun(uu)
verb(lñ)
noun(n;a)
uu n;a lï
uu n;a lñ
Wla;h
kdu moh uu
wdLHdkh
l¾uh
n;a
wdLHd;h
ls%hd moh lñ

9. DESIGN

10. Design of the parsing System for Sinhala
Base
Dictionary
Sinhala sentence
Rule
Dictionary
Morphological Analyzer
Concept
Dictionary
Sinhala Parser
Results

11. Dictionaries Base Dictionary
The Base Dictionary contains base words (Prakurthi of the Sinhala language) and Irregular words with their Morphological instructions.
Prolog predicates
lex_root_word(ID, Word, N, Rule, PS).
lex_root_word(ID, Word, V, Type, Time).
snoun([ID],Person, Number,Sex, Live, DIC, VB,Noun).
sfverb([ID],Person,Number,Sex,Live,Type, Time,Verb).
spep([ID],'nipatha').

12. Dictionaries Rule Dictionary
The rule dictionary stores rules required to generate various word forms
Prolog predicates
sinvowlet([Letters'],'soud').
sinconlet('Letter').
sin_upsraga_prefix([Letters],'Sound',Rule).
noun_vib_postfix([Letters],'Sound ',Vibakthi id).
gen_sin_noun(BAS,CL,DI,SP,VB,RL,SL,Out).
gen_sin_fverb(Base, Type, Time,SRC,RL,Out).

13. Dictionaries Concept Dictionary
The concept dictionary contains synonyms and antonyms for the words given in the base dictionary

14. Morphological Analyzer
This is preprocessor for the parser
Morphological analyzer reads the word from a sentence word by word. For each word, the morphological analyzer identifies grammatical information

15. How Morphological Analyzer works

16. Sinhala Parser
The Sinhala parser receives tokenized words from the morphological analyzer
Work as a Syntax analyzer for the Sinhala Sentence
Successfully analyze Simple and Complex Sentences.
Implemented using SWI-Prolog

17. Sinhala Parser Sentence  Subject Akkyanaya
Subject  SimpleSubject | Complex Subject
ComplexSubject  SimpleSubject ConSub
SimpleSubject  Noun | Adjective Noun
ConSub  Conjunction SimpleSubject
Akkyanaya  VerbP | Object VerbP
Object  SimpleObject | ComplexObject
ComplexObject  Conjunction SimpleObject
SimpleObject  Noun | Adjective Noun
VerbP  Verb | Adverb Verb

18. Parser tree for the given sentence

19. Software Requirement
SWI-Prolog 1.4
JDK1.4.0
Windows 98* / Linux

20. Parser in action
As a Sentence checker

21. Further work
Expanding the parsing system as English to Sinhala natural language translation system
Development/adaptation of English parser and construction of a bilingual dictionary

22. Thank you!