International Research Fellowship Program: Arabic Computational Morphology and Machine Translation

Cavalli-Sforza, Violetta, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

0107369 Cavalli-Sforza The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide eight months of support to Dr. Violetta L. Cavalli-Sforza to do research with Dr. Abdelhadi Soudi of Ecole Nationale de L'Industrie Minerale in Rabat, Morocco on an investigation of alternative approaches in Arabic-English/French machine translation. The research proposed is first, computational morphology of Arabic for analysis and generation and the second is the development of a multi-engine machine translation for combining and comparing alternative approaches to Arabic-English/French machine translation. Arabic is one of the world's major languages, used by approximately 260 million people in about twenty countries in North Africa and the Middle East as the primary language. It is also used as a second language by approximately 1.3 billion people in areas including Africa and southeastern Asia. It is gaining in importance for political, strategic and business reasons. Dr. Soudi is assistant professor at the Center for Languages and Communication and the Computer Science Department at the Ecole Nationale de l'Industrie Minerale. ***