A Formalized Reference Grammar for UNL-Based Machine Translation between English and Arabic

The Universal Networking Language (UNL) is an artificial language that can replicate human language functions in cyberspace in terms of hyper semantic networks. This paper aims to: a) design a reference grammar capable of dealing with the basic linguistic structures in order to act as a test-bed in automating translation between English and Arabic in both directions through UNL; b) evaluate the current state of the UNL system as an Interlingua in analyzing and generating English and Arabic as far as the reference structures are concerned. A reference parallel corpus of 500 structures was used. Results are promising; precision and recall of analyzing English to UNL (UNLization) are 0.979 and 0.96 respectively, while precision and recall of analyzing Arabic to UNL are 0.98 and 0.96 respectively. Precision and recall of generating English from UNL (NLization) are 0.97 and 0.96 respectively, while precision and recall of generating Arabic from UNL are 0.989 and 0.96 respectively.