Linguistics & African Languages
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://repository.ui.edu.ng/handle/123456789/287
Browse
3 results
Search Results
Item Investigating Language in the Machine Translation: Exploring Yoruba- English Machine Translation as a Case Study(Samara Alternative Linguistics Project, 2014) Odoje, C.O.Computer now translates human language without having any machine translation understanding of it. How does this happen? The answer to the language acquisition question is the concern of this paper. This paper opines that even language and though machine could only count and match for translation, the deficiencies seen in its translation are not majorly computer's rather the exploration of language acquisition. The paper explores two opposing views on language acquisition and used them to explain the processes of machine translation using Google translator and Ibadan on-going SMT research as example. It concludes that when human can adequately explain human language acquisition then there could be answer to modeling machine to master human language for translation.Item Rule-Based Machine Translation: An Interface between Formal and Natural Language Syntax A Violation of Case Filter Principle(West African Linguistics Society, 2016) Odoje, C.O.The principles which govern ways words can be combined together to form phrases and sentences in natural language is known as syntax while formal syntax is not a matter of experience (unlike natural language), but stipulations in order to provide a specified set of strings in a computer programming language. The focus of this paper therefore, is to explore linguistics as the dual planes of theory and practice, by interrogating how PROLOG was used to capture English/Yoruba natural language syntax in a rule-based machine translation. The study reveals that the machine was able to generate sentences, break sentences into phrases and words in a bid to translate them in both languagesItem The Peculiar Challenges of SMT to African Languages(The Linguistic Association of Nigeria, 2013) Odoje, C.O.The challenges of Machine translation (MT) have been identified and classified but the classification did not consider the peculiarities of African languages. This paper therefore explores the challenges of MT and reclassifies them in relation with the uniqueness of African languages. The study uses the Yoruba language as a template for other African languages and identifies some of the peculiarities of African languages which include Tie fact that they are resource-scarce languages; dycritization, demarcation of discipline, and funding, amongst others. The paper recommends measures to overcome some of these challenges.