[Foundation-l] Swahili Machine Translation First Run Completed for enwiki-20060817

Tue Aug 29 18:47:50 UTC 2006

Martin,

Thanks for the phone call today and let's get going on taking this off list
and getting the parser and grammar rules put together for the 
translator. I think we
could get this machine assisted translation of over 90% after 
application of a
set of grammar rules. I wanted to demonstrate how rapidly this could be done
and embrace the full wikipedia. As I said in the earlier post, I have not
applied any grammar, tensing, word pairing, or other rules, just a 
simple word
by word and phrase translation. I am sending the materials we discussed
and I anticiapte we can get to 95% accuracy by the end of autum. This 
would provide
an excellent basis for your African Languages Programs.

P.S. I agree that the public swahili dictionary is junk, BTW.

Jeff

Martin Benjamin wrote:

>Jeff,
>
>I applaud you for your initiative - your effort is impressive, albeit 
>unreadable.  I'll give my feedback in this post, and then suggest we 
>take the discussion of the specifics of Swahili translation off-list 
>(and welcome others who want to keep track of this thread to email us to 
>stay in the cc loop).  The last 2 or 3 paragraphs of this post do speak 
>to the wider discussion list, so other readers might wish to SKIP TOWARD 
>THE BOTTOM.
>
>  
>