SENTENCE TRANSLATION FOR KANNADA USING
MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSER AND GENERATOR
Mallamma V Reddy1, Dr. M. Hanumanthappa2
1,2
Department of Computer Science and Applications,
Bangalore University, Bangalore, INDIA
1
mallamma_vreddy@yahoo.co.in
2
hanu6572@hotmail.com
ABSTRACT
Kannada Language being one of the major Dravidian
languages of India and it has 27th place in most spoken
language in the world. But still it does not yet have
computerized grammar checking methods for a given
Kannada sentence. When Computational Linguistic is
concerns Kannada is lagging far behind compared to
Telugu and Kannada. Writing the grammar production for
any south Indian language is bit difficult. Because the
languages are highly inflected with three gender forms and
two number forms. In most of the Indian languages
including Kannada a verb ends with a token which
indicates the gender of the person (Noun/ Pronoun).
Morphological Analyser and Generator tool is an essential
component of any NLP application. Here the
morphological analyzer can simultaneously serve as a
stemmer, part of speech tagger and spell checker and
hence it becomes a very efficient tool for content
management. This paper proposes a way of using
morphological analyzer and generator for Kannada
Sentence Translation with simple illustrations.
Keywords: Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR),
Morphological Analyzer and Generator, Part of Speech Tagger
(POS)
1. INTRODUCTION
The main steps in Natural Language Processing are
Morphological Analysis: Individual words are analyzed
into their components and nonword tokens such as
punctuation are separated from the words. Syntactic
Analysis: Linear sequences of words are transformed into
structures that show how the words relate to each other.
Semantic Analysis: The structures created by the syntactic
analyzer are assigned meanings. Discourse integration:
The meaning of an individual sentence may depend on the
sentences that precede it and may influence the meanings
of the sentences that follow it. Pragmatic Analysis: The
structure representing what was said is reinterpreted to
determine what was actually meant. Morphological
analyzer and Generator is the first and the most important
phase of Natural Language Processing in Cross Language
Information Retrieval (CLIR) [1]. In this paper we are
presenting the usage of the morphological analyzer and
generator particularly for Kannada sentence translation.
Machine translation is throwing up many challenges
and opening up many opportunities for doing work. Some
of the problems relate to grammars; others pertain to word
analysis, bilingual dictionaries, language generation, etc.
In machine translation [2] morphological analysis is the
main process. First step to analysis the source language.
The language faculty in human being has the ability to
analyze a given language. There are various methods by
which a morphological analyzer can be built and we
propose the Suffix Stripping Method which is found to be
very economical. An analyzer can analyze the inflected
form of a word into suffixes and stem even if the stem is
not entered in the dictionary. The general format of the
morphological analyzer of Kannada is
Word → stem/root + suffixes
The basic principle of morphological generation
is to get forms from a root and a set of properties (lexical
category and morphological properties). A morphological
generator needs to be designed to tackle the different
syntactic categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs etc. separately, since the addition of
morphological constituents to each of these syntactic
categories depends on different types of information. The
Suffix Joining Method is used for building morphological
generators. The identified suffixes are used along with the
morphophonemic rules and morphotactics for developing
the morphological generator. The general format of the
morphological generator is
Stem/root + suffixes → Word.
2. MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
Morphological analyzer and morphological generator
are two essential and basic tools for building any language
processing application. Morphological Analysis is the
process of providing grammatical information of a word
given its suffix. Morphological analyzer is a computer
program which takes a word as input and produces its
grammatical structure as output. A morphological analyzer
will return its root/stem word along with its grammatical
information depending upon its word category. For nouns
it will provide gender, number, and case information and
for verbs, it will be tense, aspects, and modularity
e.g. - children Child + n + s (pl) (English)
Grammatical structure–morpheme order, feature values,
suffixes.
Feature value-gender, number, person etc.
Morphology deals with all combinations that form words
or parts of words. Two broad classes of morphemes, stems
and affixes: The stem is the “main morpheme” of the
word, supplying the main meaning.
e.g., eat in eat + ing.
Affixes: an affix is a bound morph that is realized as a
sequence of phonemes. Concatenative morphology (since
a word is composed of a number of morphemes
concatenated together) uses the following types of affixes
Prefixes: A Prefix is an affix that is attached in front of a
stem. e.g.-admission- re in readmission
Suffixes: A Suffix is an affix that is attached after the
stem. Suffixes are used derivationally and inflectionally.
E.g.–ing in telling
Circumfixes: A Circumfixis the combination of a prefix
and a suffix which together express some feature.
Circumfixes can be viewed as really two affixes applied
one after the other.
E.g. German ge--tinge + sag + t ([have] said)
In non-concatenative morphology (morphemes are
combined in more complex ways) the stem morpheme is
split up. The following types of affixes are used:
Infixes: Infixes are attached in between some phonemes
of a stem.
Transfixes: Transfixes are a special kind of infix involves
not only discontinuous affixes but also discontinuous
bases.
2.1 THE ROLE OF MORPHOLOGY IN
DIFFERENT LANGUAGES
Morphology is not equally prominent in all spoken
languages. What one language expresses morphologically
[3] may be expressed by a separate word or left implicit in
another language. For example, English expresses the
plural nouns by means of morphology (the forms like
boys, spies, vehicles where the morpheme, with its variant
forms expresses the plurality) but Yoruba (a language of
south-western Nigeria) use separate word expressing the
same meaning. Thus, ‘ookunrin’ means the man, and ‘a
won’ can be used to express the plural: ‘the men’. Quite
generally, we can say that English makes more use of
morphology than Yoruba. But there are many languages
that make more use of morphology than English. For
instance Sumerian uses Morphology to distinguish
between ‘he went’ and ‘I went’, and between ‘he went’
and ‘he went to him’, where English must use separate
words. The terms analytic and synthetic are used to
describe the degree to which morphology is made use in a
language. Languages like Yoruba, Vietnamese or English,
where morphology plays a relatively modest role are
called analytic. Traditionally, linguists discriminate
between the following types of languages types of
languages with regard to morphology:
· Isolating languages (e.g. Mandarin Chinese): there are
no bound forms. E.g., no affixes that can be attached
to a word. The only morphological operation is
composition.
· Agglutinative languages (e.g.Ugro-Finnicand Turkic
languages): all bound forms are either prefixes or
suffixes, i.e., they are added to a stem like beads on a
string. Every affix represents a distinct morphological
feature. Every feature is expressed by exactly one
affix.
· Inflectional languages (e.g. Indo-European language):
distinct features are merged into a single bound form
(a so called portmanteau morph). The same
underlying feature may be expressed differently,
depending on the paradigm.
· Polysynthetic languages (e.g. Limit language): these
languages express more of syntax in morphology than
other languages, e.g., verb arguments are incorporated
into the verb. This classification is quite artificial.
Real languages rarely fall cleanly into one of the
above classes, e.g., even Mandarin has a few suffixes.
Moreover, this classification mixes the aspect of what
is expressed morphologically and the means
expressing it.
3. RELATED WORK
The most competent approach to morphological
generator is using Finite State Transducers (Alicia
Garrido, et.al, 1999). Letter transducers based
morphological analyzer and generator was developed by
Alicia Garrido. Perez Aguiar has used an intuitive pattern-
matching approach for developing morphological
generator to Spanish language. Guido Minnen and his
team has developed a morphological generator based on
Finite state techniques and it is implemented using the
widely available Unix Flex utility (Guido Minnen, et.al,
2000). For Indian languages many attempts have been
made to build morphological generator. A Hindi
morphological generator has been developed based on
database driven approach (Vishal Goyal, et.al, 2008). Tel-
More Morphological generator for Telugu is based on
linguistic rules and Perl program (Madhavi G, et.al, 2006).
Morphological generator has been designed for syntactic
categories of Kannada using Paradigm based approach and
sandhi rules (P.Anandan, et.al, 2001). Finite state
machines are used for developing morphological generator
for Kannada (A. G. Menon et.al.2009).
4. KANNADA MORPHOLOGY
Kannada is a morphologically rich language in which
morphemes combine with the root words in the form of
suffixes. Kannada grammarians divide the words of the
language into three categories namely:
i) Declinable words (namapada): Morphology of
declinable words, as in many Dravidian
languages is fairly simple compared to verbs.
Kannada words are of three genders- masculine,
feminine and neutral. Declinable and Conjugable
words have two numbers- singular and plural.
ii) Verbs (kriyapada) or Conjugable words: The
verb is much more complex than the nouns.
There are three persons namely first, second and
third person. Tense of verbs is past, present or
 future. Aspect may be simple, continuous or
perfect. Verbs occur as the last constituent of the
sentence. They can be broadly divided into finite
or non-finite forms. Finite verbs have nothing
added to them and are found in the last position
of a sentence. They are marked for tense with
Person-Number-Gender (PNG) [6] markers.
Non-finite verbs, on the other hand cannot stand
alone. They are always marked for tense without
PNG marker.
Fig 1: A formal Grammar for Kannada Nouns
Fig 2: A formal Grammar for Kannada Verbs
iii) Uninflected words (avyaya): Uninflected words
may be classified as adverbs, postpositions,
conjunctions and interjections. Some of the
example words of this class are haage, mele,
tanaka, alli, bagge, anthu etc.
4.1 MORPHOPHONEMICS
In Kannada, adjacent words are often joined and
pronounced as one word. Such word combinations occur
in two ways- Sandhi and Samasa. Sandhi
(Morphophonemics) deals with changes that occur when
two words or separate morphemes come together to form a
new word. Few sandhi types are native to Kannada [5] and
few are borrowed from Sanskrit. We in our tool have
handled only Kannada sandhi. However we do not handle
Samasa.
Kannada sandhi is of three types - lopa, agama and
adesha sandhi. While lopa and agama take place both in
compound words and in the junction of the crude forms of
words and suffixes, adesha sandhi occurs only in
compound words. Detailed description of sandhi types can
be found in [10].
5. CONSTRUCTION OF MORPHOLOGICAL
ANALYZER FOR KANNADA
Morph Analyzer: The analyzer based on suffix
stripping approach is so modeled that it analyses the
inflected form of a word into suffixes and stems. It does so
by making use of a root/stem dictionary (for identifying
legitimate roots/stems), a list of suffixes, comprising of all
possible suffixes that various categories can take (in order
to identify a valid suffix), and the morpheme sequencing
rules. The Root Dictionary contains a list of roots, each
with its lexical category and features.
The suffix stripping algorithm is a method of
morphological analysis which makes use of a root/stem
dictionary (for identifying legitimate roots/stems), a list of
suffixes, comprising of all possible suffixes that various
categories can take, and the morpheme sequencing rules.
This method is economical. Once the suffixes are
identified, removing the suffixes and applying proper
morpheme sequencing rules can obtain the stem.
In order to identify the legitimate roots/stems, the
dictionary of root/stem needs to be as exhaustive as
possible. Considering this fact, the analyzer is designed to
provide three types of outputs such as:
The Correct analysis: This is obtained on the basis of a
complete match of suffixes, rules and the existence of the
analyzed stem/root in the root dictionary.
Probable analysis: This is obtained on the basis of either
a matching of the suffixes and rules, even if the root/stem
is not found in the dictionary or a matching of the suffixes,
but not any supporting rule or existing root in the
dictionary.
Unprocessed words: These are the words which have
remained unanalyzed due to either absence of the suffix in
the suffix list or due to the absence of the rule in the list.
Morph Generator: The aim in morphological generation
is to produce the inflected form of a word according to the
features and values in the Feature Structure. It is also
necessary to reuse the linguistic resources created for
analysis purpose. From practical point of view,
morphological generation is the inverse process of
analysis, namely the process of converting the internal
representation of a word to its surface form. The same rule
definitions can be used to generate the desired word form
as used for analysis.
The morphological generation mainly deals with
the concatenation of corresponding suffixes with the root
word to form a word of specific grammatical category to
perform this task the suffix joining method has been used.
The input of the morphological generator would be the
root word which then inflects this word to the morphology
of the respective language and gives as the output the
target forms of the word. The Morphological structure of
Kannada verb is quite complex since it caters to person,
gender, and number markings and also combines with
auxiliaries that indicate aspect, mood etc While
morphologically generating the verb, the gender, number
and person of the subject is necessary in order to select the
appropriate suffix catering to the selected tense. So while
going from English to Kannada, there are about eleven
different forms for a single stem in Kannada
Fig 3: Block Diagram of English-Kannada Translation

5.1 BILINGUAL DICTIONARY
Bilingual dictionary is a crucial part not only for machine
translation, but also for other natural language processing
applications such as cross-language information retrieval.
Creating a bilingual dictionary in the form of lexemes or
words is a difficult task as it covers more than one area of
meaning, but these multiple meanings don’t correspond to
a single word in the target language. Basically machine
translation systems are linked to electronic dictionaries.
The content of the dictionaries must be adequate in both
quantity and quality: that is, the vocabulary coverage must
be extensive and appropriately selected, and the translation
equivalents carefully chosen, if target language output is to
be satisfactory or indeed even possible. The size and
quality of dictionary limits the scope and coverage of a
system, and the quality of translation that can be
expected[4]. The dictionary entries are based on lexical
stems of specified category, strictly monolingual analysis
and generation dictionaries, and transfer dictionaries based
on language-pair-specific information.
5.2 ALGORITHM FOR MORPHOLOGICAL
ANALYZER AND GENERATOR
In this section we are going to describe about the new
algorithm which is developed for morphological generator.
The main advantage for this algorithm [6] is simple and
accurate.
translation extraction was evaluated based on precision
and recall rates at the word. Since, we considered exactly
one word in the source language and one translation in the
target language at a time.
The word level recall and precision rates were defined as
follows:
(1)
(2)
7. RESULTS
Cross Language Information Retrieval Tool [7] is built by
using the ASP.NET as front end and for a Database the
Kannada is encrypted by using the Encoding system.
English and Kannada are the source language and the
target language, respectively, in our query translation. All
the experiments carried out here involve the same set of
English queries and the same query expansion, translation
and retrieval method. The only difference between the
experimental conditions is in what dictionaries are used in
the query translation. The experiment results as shown in
fig 4.

Algorithm

Step 1: Get the word to be analyzed.

Step 2: Check whether the entered word is found in the
Root Dictionary.
Step 3: If the word is found in the dictionary, stop;
Else
Step 4: Separate any suffix from the right hand side
Step 5: If any suffix is present in the word, then check the
availability of the suffix in the dictionary.
Then
Step 6: Remove the suffix present,
Then re-initialize the word without identified suffix, Go to
Step 2.
Step 7: Repeat this process until the Dictionary finds the
root/stem word.
Step 8: Store the English root/stem word in a variable and
then get the corresponding Kannada word from the
bilingual dictionary
Step 9: Check what all grammatical features does the
English word have given and then generate the
corresponding features for the Kannada word
Step 10: Exit.

6. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP

Several corpora were collected to estimate the parameters

of the proposed models and to evaluate the performance of
the proposed approach. The corpus BUBShabdaSagara-
2011 for training consisted of 9000 words in dictionary for Fig 4: Sample Result
Kannada. The training corpus composed of a bilingual
word list. In the experiment, the performance of word
 Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 13–
8. CONCLUSION No.8, January 2011.

The paper is about the design and development of [7]. Mallamma.V.Reddy, Dr.M.Hanumanthappa, “CLIR
morphological analyzer and generator for Kannada Project (English to Kannada and Telugu)”
Language. Dictionaries are of critical importance in http://bangaloreuniversitydictionary//menu.asp
machine translation. A bilingual dictionary or translation
dictionary is a specialized dictionary used to translate
words or phrases from one language to another. They are
the largest components of an MT system in terms of the
amount of information they hold. The proper functioning
of a morphological generator necessitates efficiency in the
generation of a word, once provided its Root or Stem and
the corresponding feature values. The Suffix Stripping for
morphological analyzer and the Suffix Joining for the
morphological generation of words proved to be an
efficient method. Since words are formed by the suffix
addition with root, most of the words can take the POS tag
based on the root or stem. The results of the first phase of
the suffix stripping approach have been fairly
encouraging. It was observed, that with an average of 8000
to 9000 root entries, the affix stripping approach gives
around 70% coverage. The coverage of the system is
directly related to the size of the dictionary. We hope to
expand and make the system more robust by increasing the
dictionary size.

Acknowledgement

This is the major research project entitled Cross-

Language Information Retrieval sanctioned to Dr. M.
Hanumanthappa, PI-UGC-MH, Department of computer
science and applications by the University grant
commission. We thank to the UGC for financial
assistance. This paper is in continuation of the project
carried out at the Bangalore University, Bangalore, India.

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