Development of a Prepositional Phrase Machine Translation System

Abstract

The study reported in this paper considered English to Yorùbá machine translation system for prepositional phrase. The prepositional phrase machine translation system is a subset of English to Yorùbá machine translation (EYMT) system. There are issues to address in English to Yorùbá machine translation system. Some of these issues are: serial verb, split verbs, noun phrase, verb phrase, numerals and prepositional phrase to mention few. The prepositional phrase (PP) plays a significant role in EYMT system because it describes the object position in a sentence. The two languages are subject verb object (SVO). In some sentences PP can be in subject and object positions. The object position was considered in the study reported in this paper. The theoretical framework was considered first. Therein the structure of PP was x-rayed and the translation process was modelled and designed. The UML was used to design the system. The flowchart, sequence, use case, and class diagrams were designed using the UML. A bilingual database (lexicon) was built to store words from the source language (English) and its equivalent target language (Yorùbá), and the system translation process model was implemented using the Java programming language. The developed system was tested and the sample outputs were compared with the Yorùbá Google translator outputs. The system performed better than the Yorùbá Google translator in terms of good orthography and syntax.