SEMINAR
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING
ABSTRACT
TURKISH TO CRIMEAN TATAR
MACHINE TRANSLATION SYSTEM
Kemal Altıntaş
MS in Computer Engineering
Supervisor: Asst.Prof.İlyas Çiçekli
July 25, 2001
Machine translation has always been interesting to people since the invention of computers. Research has been conducted on western languages such as English and French, and Turkish and Turkic languages have been left out of the scene. Machine translation between closely related languages is easier than between language pairs that are not related with each other. Having many parts of their grammars and vocabularies in common, the amount of effort needed to develop a system between related languages is easier. Being languages of people who share large parts of their culture, the concepts and the way of thinking are similar. A translation system that makes a morphological analysis supported by simpler translation rules and context dependent bilingual dictionaries would suffice most of the time. Usually a semantic analysis is not needed.
This thesis presents a machine translation system from Turkish to Crimean Tatar that uses finite state techniques for the translation process. Turkish and Crimean Tatar, being two very close languages, propose a sample model for translation between close pairs of languages. The system we developed takes a Turkish sentence, analyses all the words morphologically, translates the grammatical and context dependent structures, translates the root words and finally morphologically generates the Crimean Tatar text. We try to guarantee that at least one of the outputs is a true translation of the input sentence.
Keywords: Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation, Turkish, Turkic Languages, Crimean Tatar.
The Seminar will be on July 25 2001
at 10:30 in EA 502