MACHINE TRANSLATION FOR THE WELSH LANGUAGE
Tender to the Welsh Language Board
Background
This tender document details the application led by Canolfan Bedwyr, University of Wales, Bangor for the project proposed by the Welsh Language Board for English-Welsh and Welsh-English machine translation.
This tender document is being made in cooperation with partners from leading institutions and companies in the field of machine translation. 
The tender states not only how the partners will fulfil the requirements of the immediate two year project but also strategies for firmly establishing an international network of excellence within which a centre of competence in Wales may play its role and thus be best able to continue research and development for improved machine translation and indeed any other multilingual computing for the Welsh language.
Partners
The partners involved in the tender document are:
•	University of Wales, Bangor, Wales
•	University of Yamaguchi, Japan
•	France Telecom, France
•	Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Together all partners have a wide ranging and world leading complementary expertise in various aspects in language technology, including machine translation. 
The project will be directed by the e-Welsh Terminology and Language Engineering Unit at Canolfan Bedwyr within the University of Wales, Bangor. 
Each partner has a leading expertise in each of the various types of machine translation as described in later sections of this document.
 
Method of Working
Canolfan Bedwyr has in recent years implemented within such projects as WISPR (Welsh and Irish Speech Processing Resources) remote working methods and tools to allow it to manage and conduct work and collaboration in a distributed manner.  
A progress report on developing distributed methods of working in the WISPR project has been included with this tender (Appendix 1).
Thus an international network of partners coordinated from Canolfan Bedwyr is realistic to fulfil the requirements of this MT project. 
The project will have Canolfan Bedwyr as its central point for project management and workshops and visits that will exchange knowledge between all partners and further secure the competencies in computational linguistics at Bangor. 
Dewi B Jones from Canolfan Bedwyr will proposed as project manager and academic supervisors from the partner organisations will be designated to guide development of each separate strand of MT. 
Individual team members will be assigned lead roles in the various strands, but it is understood that other team members and additional support will be called upon as necessary during the life of the project. This is illustrated in the attached organisational chart.
 
Implementation of Requirements
1.      Statistics Based Machine Translation (SMT)
This strand of the project will have DR John D Phillips from the Department of Linguistics, Yamaguchi University, Japan as partner.  
Dr Phillips has (as stated in  H.Somers’ report to the Welsh Language Board 2004) a stochastic machine translation system built using a parallel text corpus from the NIV English translation of the Bible and Y Beibl Cymraeg Newydd (1988 translation of the Bible and the Collins Welsh/English Dictionary. (ref. The Bible as a basis for machine translation, John D Phillips, Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics)
We would aim to draw a lot on the excellent work already carried out by Dr Phillips in order to fulfil SMT whilst incorporating further resources such as parallel texts and dictionaries from the University of Wales, Bangor and the Welsh Assembly. 
The e-Welsh team will add parallel texts from the University of Wales, Bangor’s own translation memory system. Translations are quality controlled and consist of texts from all academic and administrative documents as well as all websites translated that are translated in house by the four academic translations based also at Canolfan Bedwyr. S
Subject to permission, Canolfan Bedwyr will also use additional parallel texts from the Welsh Assembly Record.  
Canolfan Bedwyr will include their own extensive databases of general language and specialist bilingual English/Welsh terminology dictionaries, containing 150 000 words and phrases, along with disambiguators/semantic readings, part of speech and additional grammar information. 
Academic supervisor: John D. Phillips (Department of Linguistics, Univeristy of Yamaguchi), Canolfan Bedwyr Contacts, Dr. Ivan Uemlianin, Ambrose Choy)
 
2. Example Based Machine Translation (EBMT)
This strand of the project will have the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as its partner. 
The Language Technologies Institute was founded in 1996 as an extension of the Center for Machine Translation. It forms part of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, USA. According to US News & World Report magazine, CMU annually ranks among the USA's top universities, while in 2002 CMU's School of Computer Science was ranked first above all USA university computer science departments. 
The work carried out to develop EBMT based machine translation for Welsh will be based on the transfer based system developed within Carnegie Mellon’s AVENUE program.
AVENUE is concerned with the design and development of machine translation for languages which have scarce resources or are minority languages. To date, its specific focus has been on Native and Latin American languages however CMU have indicated a strong interest in being involved to English-Welsh machine translation.  
Although Welsh is in the fortunate position of having more electronic linguistic tools than many other minority language, AVENUE has been designed to minimize development time and cost and is therefore suitable for use in this two year project.
In the AVENUE MT system, translation rules are learnt automatically from human translated parallel texts and word aligned data. Machine learning techniques are used to generalize transfer rules from specific translated examples and combines with decoding techniques from SMT for producing the best translation from a lattice of translation segments.  
Its most active work is on designing a typologically comprehensive elicitation corpus, advanced techniques of automatic rule learning, improved decoding, and rule refinement via user interaction. 
Academic Supervisor: Dr Alon Lavie (Language Technologies Institute, CMU), Canolfan Bedwyr Contacts: Dr Briony Williams, Dr Rhys Jones)
 
3. Rule Based Machine Translation (RBMT)
This strand of the project will involve Canolfan Bedwyr taking advantage of their extensive array of language tools to develop RBMT whilst being aided by the Research and Development Laboratory at France Telecom. 
France Telecom's Research and Development division states that "the overarching objective is customer-focused innovation, one of our fundamental competitive advantages". Hence their emphasis is on customer-led and needs-led research rather than unfocused research. It is also extensive: France Telecom R&D (formerly CNET) is Europe’s top telecommunications research organization, home to 90 percent of the company’s 3,400 researchers. It spans 12 facilities, four of them outside France (in San Francisco, Boston, London and Tokyo), plus the research labs of TP S.A. in Poland and teams in Beijing and New Delhi. Research is structured according to fifteen "world class" areas determined by a jury of independent experts. In 2002, the parent company (France Telecom) launched its Internet subsidiary (Wanadoo) on the Paris stock market, and also acquired the British mobile telephone operator Orange, thus becoming the second largest European player in the mobile phone industry. Its research division features among the top European leaders in telecom R&D.
France Telecom are currently working on RBMT for English, French and German. 
The work will involve constructing Dependency Grammar Rules for Welsh. Components from Cysgliad such as bilingual dictionaries, Welsh morphological analyser and POS tagger will be used in this work. Grammar rules already present in Cysill spelling and grammer checking software will be used as an input to rules required within RBMT.  
Academic Supervisor: Dr Johannes Heinke (France Télécom Recherche & Développement TECH/EASY, Canolfan Bedwyr Contact: Ivan Uemlianin.
4. Composite Engine for use within Microsoft Office 2003 and other office programs
 
[see 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dno2k3ta/html/odc_ofbiltransdict2003.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/rssdk/html/rsconAboutRSSDK_HV01082263.asp]
5. Composite engine available as a web-based service for the public   
 
6. Speech-to-speech translation
Certain components of speech-to-speech translation for Welsh already exist (at least in embryonic form), as follows: 

 - The WISPR project at Canolfan Bedwyr has been developing text-to-speech synthesis for Welsh, partly re-using resources developed ten years ago for a less sophisticated text-to-speech system for Welsh. 

 - As part of the WISPR project, some preliminary work has been carried out in developing the "acoustic models" that might be needed in a speech recognition system for Welsh. Some initial tools and expertise have already been developed, and the way has been smoothed for any future project in automatic speech recognition for Welsh. A further project called SpeechBridge proposes developing limited domain speaker-specific speech recognition for Welsh. Subject to funding approval, this is scheduled to run from January 2006 to July 2007. 

 - A speech-to-speech translation system would also require speech synthesis and recognition for English.  Expertise has been built up at Canolfan Bedwyr in developing new synthetic voices, which would enable an English voice to be developed fairly quickly in any future project. 

 - Speech recognition for English would require a new project, as this task is more complex than speech synthesis.  The task could be made more tractable by limiting the domain, and hence the vocabulary to be used. 

A full "dialogue system" (utilising speech-to-speech translation) is still a little way in the future, but Canolfan Bedwyr has already laid much of the groundwork for the speech components of this task.  The proposed machine translation project would form the core of any such system, while the existing WISPR project would contribute essential tools and resources to it.
 
7. Futureproofing
Although this tender calls for MT between English and Welsh only, we are eager to design an open-ended system which will be an open-ended and widely adaptable system. All the systems mentioned above are open to adaptation to other languages. The small some of money assigned in this project for futureproofing will be used to write bids for European funding to take this work forward in a network of institutions, of which the current partners will form the core.

8. Welsh Language Resources at Canolfan Bedwyr
Canolfan Bedwyr is the only institution in the world that conducts Language Engineering for developing software components and related resources to support Welsh language linguistic characteristics and requirements from the Welsh speaking community.
The identification, development and maintenance of such linguistic software components is regarded as a crucial activity by Canolfan Bedwyr. Latest techniques from the international Natural Language Processing research community are closely followed and are used, where applicable, to aid constructing a library of building blocks for use in as wide a range of applications as possible. (e.g.  Hicks W.J. : Welsh Proofing Tools – Making a Little NLP Go a Long Way (Workshop on International Proofing Tools and Language Technologies Greece 2004)) 
To date this library represents the result of many man months of development and improvement from integration into many applications and is thus at a high level of maturity and capability. Applications and projects to have benefited include :
•	Cysill 3.0 (Welsh Spelling and Grammar Checker)
•	Cysgeir (English-Welsh CD based electronic dictionaries)
•	Cysgliad's Pop-up dictionary facility. (a merging of Cysill and Cygeir functionalities)
•	BBC LearnWelsh on-line Welsh-English dictionary
•	Microsoft Word's Spelling checker 
•	Star/OpenOffice.org spelling checker
Welsh-English machine translation would also be an end application requiring Canolfan Bedwyr's software building blocks either as components in the eventual translation engines or as tools during the development process.

Library components likely to be of greatest significance to machine translation are : 
•	Welsh Monolingual and Bilingual Dictionaries
The library employs a dictionary of 45000 entries which contain all the grammatical and morphological information for a basic Welsh lexeme. 
The dictionary also contain the English translations of the Welsh entries. 
•	Lemmatiser
With the aid of the dictionary, this component contains all the morphological information for a given Welsh word: its mutation, list of possible parts of speech. For verbs it contains verb endings, tense and person. Thus it can 'lemmatise' a word and provide the basic lexeme base. e.g. 'ellir' is recognised as the mutated impersonal present tense of the verb 'gallu'. (N.B. this capability is key to be able to provide pop up dictionary where nearly all words in a give Welsh text can be recognised and an English translation offered from the library's bilingual dictionary component. 

This component is capable also of generating all possible morphological forms of a word. 
•	Language Detector
Since Welsh is often used in a bilingual environment where some parts of a text may contain an English word, this component can be called upon to determine the language of the word. Consideration is given to whether the word may be a misspelling of a Welsh word. 
•	Part of Speech Tagger
This component tags words in a given text with their parts of speech. Such information is valuable to parse or perform pattern matching across texts. 

A rule based tagger using a constraint grammar with hand written rules has been developed and is loosely based on the ENGCG formalism developed for tagging English text. For more infomation see ENGCG, Information on the English Constraint Grammar (http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~avoutila/cg/index.html) and Voutilainen A 2003, Part Of Speech Tagging, In (ed) Mitkov, R Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics.

The rules have been written and improved incrementally as needed. 
•	Grammar Checker and Rule Base
The grammar checker component primarily checks for three main kinds of errors in a given text – mutation errors, incorrect syntax and incorrect word choice (most incorrect literal translations from English). 

A collection of Welsh grammar rules are defined separately from the checker, at the moment 200 mutation rules and 300 non-mutation rules, using again a simple constraint grammar. 

Code for the realisation of the grammar rules in the grammar checker is automatically generated by other library components from the rule base.