Nelson Marcos

Kristine Mae Adlaon, Nelson Marcos

Parallel corpus is a critical resource in machine learning-based translation. The task of collecting, extracting, and aligning texts in order to build an acceptable corpus for doing the translation is very tedious most especially for low-resource languages. In this paper, we present the efforts made to build a parallel corpus for Cebuano and Filipino from two different domains: biblical texts and the web. For the biblical resource, subword unit translation for verbs and copy-able approach for nouns were applied to correct inconsistencies in the translation. This correction mechanism was applied as a preprocessing technique. On the other hand, for Wikipedia being the main web resource, commonly occurring topic segments were extracted from both the source and the target languages. These observed topic segments are unique in 4 different categories. The identification of these topic segments may be used for the automatic extraction of sentences. A Recurrent Neural Network was used to implement the translation using OpenNMT sequence modeling tool in TensorFlow. The two different corpora were then evaluated by using them as two separate inputs in the neural network. Results have shown a difference in BLEU scores in both corpora.

Kristine Mae M. Adlaon, Nelson Marcos

The Philippines is an archipelago composed of 7, 641 different islands with more than 150 different languages. This linguistic differences and diversity, though may be seen as a beautiful feature, have contributed to the difficulty in the promotion of educational and cultural development of different domains in the country. An effective machine translation system solely dedicated to cater Philippine languages will surely help bridge this gap. In this research work, a never before applied approach for language translation to a Philippine language was used for a Cebuano to Tagalog translator. A Recurrent Neural Network was used to implement the translator using OpenNMT sequence modeling tool in TensorFlow. The performance of the translation was evaluated using the BLEU Score metric. For the Cebuano to Tagalog translation, BLEU produced a score of 20.01. A subword unit translation for verbs and copyable approach was performed where commonly seen mistranslated words from the source to the target were corrected. The BLEU score increased to 22.87. Though slightly higher, this score still indicates that the translation is somehow understandable but is not yet considered as a good translation.