A synchronised tree adjoining Grammar for English to Tamil Machine Translation

Tree adjoining Grammar (TAG) is a rich formalism for capturing syntax and some limited semantics of Natural languages. The XTAG project has contributed a very comprehensive TAG for English Language. Although TAGs have been proposed nearly 40 years ago by Joshi et al, 1975, their usage and application in the Indian Languages have been very rare, predominantly due to their complexity and lack of resources. In this paper we discuss a new TAG system and methodology of development for Tamil Language that can be extended for other Indian languages. The trees are developed synchronously with a minimalistic grammar obtained by careful pruning of XTAG English Grammar. We also apply Chomskian minimalism on these TAG trees, so as to make them simple and easily parsable. Furthermore we have also developed a parser that can parse simple sentences using the above mentioned grammar, and generating a TAG derivation that can be used for dependency resolution. Due to the synchronous nature of these TAG pairs they can be readily adapted for Formalism based Machine Translation (MT) from English to Tamil and vice versa.