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Addis Ababa University Libraries Electronic Thesis and Dissertations: AAU-ETD! >
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Thesis - Computer Engineering >
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http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/2552
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| Title: | Machine Translation System for Amharic Text to Ethiopian Sign Language |
| Authors: | Dagnachew, Feleke Wolde |
| Advisors: | Dr. Eneyew Adugna |
| Keywords: | Deaf
machine translation
Amharic morphology
ESL
Sign Language |
| Copyright: | Oct-2011 |
| Date Added: | 4-May-2012 |
| Publisher: | AAU |
| Abstract: | Machine Translation (MT) system development from one language to another is one of
the areas in human computer interaction researches for the last half century. In this thesis the first
Amharic to Ethiopian Sign Language (ESL) MT system was designed and implemented for
limited vocabulary.
The MT system function is to change or translate a given Amharic text words to their
equivalent representation in ESL. To achieve this goal the translation engine should have
subsystems to analyze source language (Amharic) and synthesize target language (ESL). Due to
close relation of source and target language, in addition to the system is designed for limited
vocabulary, Rule Based Machine Translation (RBMT) approach is deployed in this research.
Since there was no enough information on grammar of ESL, this thesis scope is limited to
morphological level translation; i.e. direct RBMT architecture was followed.
While designing Amharic language morphological analyzer subsystem, it was found that
Amharic alphabets (fidel) rearrangement based on their phonetic behavior gave a much needed
pattern to apply expansion rules. In this thesis, a new arrangement of fidel was proposed to be
used in computer based researches on Amharic language which involve morphology or
phonology.
Amharic language is morphologically rich language, so it‟s not easy to prepare bilingual
dictionary with all possible word derivations. To overcome this problem morphological
expansion method was used. In this particular case 40 rules were applied on 20 verbs and 3 rules
applied on 10 nouns to get a dictionary with entries more than 800.
Many Sign Language(SL) translation researches, nowadays use universal transcription
methods; HamNoSys and SiGML. This thesis also applied these transcription tools for the first
time on ESL. For a randomly selected fifty words and all alphabets in ESL, the transcription was
done.
The system was designed to map a given Amharic word to ESL equivalent words using
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morphological analysis and synthesis. If the word is not in the bilingual dictionary, it‟ll finger
spell rather than ignoring it. And performance of the system was found to be more than 80%. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/2552 |
| Appears in: | Thesis - Computer Engineering
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