Rule Based Reordering and Morphological Processing for English-Malayalam Statistical Machine Translation

In this paper, we mention our work on incorporating rule based reordering and morphological information for English to Malayalam statistical machine translation. The main ideas which have proven very effective are (i) reordering the English source sentence according to Malayalam syntax, and (ii) using the root suffix separation on both English and Malayalam words. The first one is done by applying simple modified transformation rules on the English parse tree, which is given by the Stanford Dependency Parser. The second one is developed by using a morph analyzer. This approach achieves good performance and better results over the phrase-based system. Our approach avoids the use of parsing for the target language (Malayalam), making it suitable for statistical machine translation from English to Malayalam, since parsing tools for Malayalam are currently not available.