e-Wika: Philippine Connectivity through Language

In this paper, we present what we have attempted towards connecting the Philippine islands through the digitalization of the Philippine languages and their respective applications, and what we intend to do in the future. We present the development of a multi-engine bi-directional English-Filipino Machine Translation (MT) system, and the building of various language resources and tools for this system. Though linguistic information on Philippine languages are available, as of yet, the focus has been on theoretical linguistics and little has been done on the computational aspects. We report here our attempts in the manual construction of these language resources such as the grammar, lexicon, morphological information, and the corpora which were literally built from almost non-existent digital forms. Due to the inherent difficulties of manual construction, we also discuss our experiments on various technologies for automatic extraction of these resources to handle the intricacies of the Filipino language, designed with the intention of using them for the MT system. We explore here what will be our possible future directions in terms of connecting the Philippine islands through the digitalization of our Languages.