Machine Translation Infrastructure for Turkic Languages (MT-Turk)

In this study, a multilingual, extensible machine translation infrastructure for grammatically similar Turkic languages “MT-Turk”is presented. MT-Turk infrastructure has multi-word support and is designed using a combined rule-based translation approach thatunites the strengths of interlingual and transfer approaches. This resulted in achieving ease ofextensibility byadding new Turkic languages. The new language can be used both as destination and as source language achieving two-way extensibility. In addition, the infrastructure is strengthened with the ability of learning from previous translations and using the suggestions of previous users for disambiguation.Finally, the success of MT-Turk for three Turkic languages -Turkish, Kirghiz and Kazan- is evaluated using BiLingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) metric and it is seen that the suggestion system improved the success by 43.66% in average.Although the lack of linguistic resources affected the success of the system negatively, this study led to the introduction of an extensible infrastructure that can learn from previous translations.