How to reverse use a nlp parser to generate sentences

Question

I am trying to develop a Sinhala (My native language) to English translator. Still I am thinking for an approach.

If I however parse a sentence of my language, then can I use that for generating english sentence with the help of stanford parser or any other parser. Or is there any other method you can recommend.

And I am thinking of a bottom up parser for my language, but still have no idea how to implement. Any suggestions for steps I can follow.

Thanks Mathee

Answer 1

My Pyramids parser is an unconventional single-sentence parser for English. (It is capable of parsing other languages too, but a grammar must be specified.) The parser can not only parse English into parse trees, but can convert back and forth between parse trees and word-level semantic graphs, which are graphs that describe the semantic relationships between all the words in a sentence. The correct word order is reconstructed based on the contents of the graph; all that needs to be provided, other than the words and their relationships, is the type of sentence (statement, question, command) and the linguistic category of each word (noun, determiner, verb, etc.). From there it is straight-forward to join the tokens of the parse tree into a sentence.

The parser is a (very early) alpha pre-release, but it is functional and actively maintained. I am currently using it to translate back and forth between English and an internal semantic representation used by a conversational agent (a "chat bot", but capable of more in-depth language understanding). If you decide to use the parser, do let me know. I will be happy to provide any assistance you might need with installing, using, or improving it.

Answer 2

This course on Coursera may help you implement a translator. From what I know based on that course, you can use a training set tagged by parts of speech (i.e. noun, verb, etc.) and use that training test to parse other sentence. I suggest looking into hidden Markov models.