Rapid Prototyping of a Transfer-based Hebrew-to-English Machine Translation System

We describe the rapid development of a preliminary Hebrew-to-English Machine Translation system under a transfer-based framework specifically designed for rapid MT prototyping for languages with limited linguistic resources. The task is particularly challenging due to two main reasons: the high lexical and morphological ambiguity of Hebrew and the dearth of available resources for the language. Existing, publicly available resources were adapted in novel ways to support the MT task. The methodology behind the system combines two separate modules: a transfer engine which produces a lattice of possible translation segments, and a decoder which searches and selects the most likely translation according to an English language model. We demonstrate that a small manually crafted set of transfer rules suffices to produce legible translations. Performance results are evaluated using state of the art measures and are shown to be encouraging.