The Development Of English — Arabic Machine Translation System Modules As An Advanced Software Engineering Course

Abstract

Developing a Machine Translation (MT) system is well known to be a time and effort consuming task. It requires the development of monolingual and bi-lingual dictionaries, lexical analyzers and generators, and parsers and generators of the source and target languages, in addition to a transfer module in the case of transfer-based MT, or some equivalent module. This activity is usually undertaken by dedicated research centers and software development companies. This paper reports on an attempt to develop various modules of an English-to-Arabic MT system as part of a course. The course was taught as an advanced software engineering course to students working on their graduation projects. We explain the adopted work methodology, the various modules that were worked on, as well as the achievements and difficulties