Hindi Correspondence of Bengali Nominal Suffixes

Abstract

One bottleneck of Bengali to Hindi transfer based machine translation system is the translation of suffixes of noun. The appropriate translation of a nominal suffix often depends on the semantic role of the corresponding noun chunk in the sentence. With the availability of a high performance Bengali morphological analyzer and a basic Bengali parser it is possible to identify the role of each noun chunk. This information may be used for building rules for translating the ambiguous nominal suffixes. As there are some similarities between the uses of Bengali and Hindi nominal suffixes we find that the rules may be identified by linguistically analyzing corpus data. In this paper, we identify rules for the ambiguous four Bengali nominal suffixes from corpus data and evaluate their performances. This set of rules is able to resolve a majority of the nominal suffix ambiguities in Bengali to Hindi transfer based machine translation system. Using the rules, we are able to translate 98.17% Bengali nouns correctly which is much better than the baseline ILMT system's accuracy of 62.8%.