A specific domain translator application in a floristic digital library

Abstract

In this paper, SAVIA is introduced; a system for attaining automatic translation (English-to-Spanish) of morphological descriptions of plants. It was developed at Universidad de las Américas Puebla, as part of a collaborative research with the Flora of North America (FNA) project, currently under construction at the Missouri Botanical Garden [Schnase et al. 1994]. The system has been put forward as a potential solution to the problem of knowledge distribution and multilingual access to Digital Libraries. Digital Libraries (DLs) are one of the emerging fields of study in computer science and one of the more interesting multidisciplinary research areas. Knowledge distribution is one of its main objectives; hence, the need to develop multilingual applications that make knowledge available to every community that cannot communicate in the language in which DLs material and services where implemented. A prototype of the system has been developed using technologies based on Glossary-Based Machine Translation and the semantic grammar model. Some examples are presented showing the possibilities of the system. Conclusions will be drawn from the performance of the system and suggestions are included considering further developments. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000.