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Apertium: a free/open-source platform for rule-based machine translation

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Machine Translation

Abstract

Apertium is a free/open-source platform for rule-based machine translation. It is being widely used to build machine translation systems for a variety of language pairs, especially in those cases (mainly with related-language pairs) where shallow transfer suffices to produce good quality translations, although it has also proven useful in assimilation scenarios with more distant pairs involved. This article summarises the Apertium platform: the translation engine, the encoding of linguistic data, and the tools developed around the platform. The present limitations of the platform and the challenges posed for the coming years are also discussed. Finally, evaluation results for some of the most active language pairs are presented. An appendix describes Apertium as a free/open-source project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Grup Transducens, Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics, Universitat d’Alacant, Alacant, Spain

    Mikel L. Forcada, Mireia Ginestí-Rosell, Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Felipe Sánchez-Martínez & Francis M. Tyers

  2. Copenhagen University College of Engineering, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Jacob Nordfalk

  3. Eolaistriu Technologies, Thurles, Ireland

    Jim O’Regan

  4. Prompsit Language Engineering, Elche, Spain

    Sergio Ortiz-Rojas & Gema Ramírez-Sánchez

Authors
  1. Mikel L. Forcada
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  2. Mireia Ginestí-Rosell
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  3. Jacob Nordfalk
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  4. Jim O’Regan
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  5. Sergio Ortiz-Rojas
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  6. Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz
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  7. Felipe Sánchez-Martínez
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  8. Gema Ramírez-Sánchez
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  9. Francis M. Tyers
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Felipe Sánchez-Martínez.

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Forcada, M.L., Ginestí-Rosell, M., Nordfalk, J. et al. Apertium: a free/open-source platform for rule-based machine translation. Machine Translation 25, 127–144 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-011-9090-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-011-9090-0

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