Developing lexicon databases for English to Sinhala machine translation

Machine translation has been identified as one of the most challenging areas in natural language processing. In such systems, lexicon databases are fundamental to handle all translation requirements including lexicon, syntax and semantics information. This paper reports on the design and development of a lexicon database sub-system for English to Sinhala machine translation system. This system has customized the famous WordNet for English lexicon database, and structured three Sinhala dictionaries as per Japanese EDR system. SWI-Prolog has been used for the development of the core of the translation system.