Sense disambiguation of simple prepositions in English to Kannada Machine Translation

The preposition sense disambiguation is a critical task in any reliable Machine Translation (MT) system. The pervasive use of preposition or its equivalent in most of the languages makes it a crucial element during translation. Unlike English, there is no concept of preposition in Kannada. English prepositions are translated to Kannada by attaching appropriate inflections to the head noun of the prepositional phrase. Further post-positional words may also appear in Kannada translation for some prepositions. The choice of the appropriate post-positional word depends on the WordNet synset information of the head noun. The paper proposes an algorithm to disambiguate sense of a simple preposition in English to Kannada MT. It uses properties of the head noun and complement of the preposition for disambiguation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt towards introducing an algorithm to disambiguate sense of the preposition during English to Kannada MT. Experiments were conducted and the result obtained has been described. The performance of an algorithm is proved to be reliable and scalable.