Persian Language

Gal Halfon - Machine Translation Seminar History Language Origin Historical Facts

Ancient Central Asia Tribes

“Arya” tribes migrated to Iran

Persian Ancient Empire

Zoroastrianism religion (6th century B.C)

Old-Mid Persian language - until 7th century A.D

Muslim Empire

Muslim Religion - 7th century

Adopted arabic alphabet Old Persian Persian Native Speakers Distribution

70 milion ﬂuent speakers

110 milion total speakers

Types of Persian:

Western - Iran

Eastern - Afghanistan

Tajiki - Tajikistan Persian Language

Grammar is similar to Latin-origin languages

Arabic-based alphabet

Inﬂuence:

Arabic - 24% of the everyday vocabulary are of Arab origin.

Little Turkish/Mongolian Major Modiﬁcations from Arabic Alphabet

Addition of 4 letters

( ه ) changes to heh ( ة ) teh Marbuta

5 major vowels - (a, i, e, o, u) Persian Grammar

SOV word order

The main clause precedes a subordinate clause

Aglutination - Stringing morphemes together Nouns

Nouns

Persian nouns have no grammatical gender

nouns can be made plural using a separate word (ها) ‹hā›

(ان) ‹pluralize using the suﬃx ‹-ān afer the word (را) ‹Accusative case using the word ‹rā Adjective

Adjectives

Typicaly folowed the noun using Ezāfe construct (-e- or -i-).

barādar-e-bozorg = “Big Brother”

Sometimes can be before the noun.

khosh-bakht = good-luck

Example sentence

سگ من از گربهی تو کوچکتر است

Sag-e man az gorbe-ye to kuchektar ast; My dog is smaler than your cat. Verbs

Morpheme pattern:

( NEG - DUR or SUBJ / IMPER ) - root - PAST - PERSON - ACC-ENCLITIC

Tenses -

past, perfect, pluperfect, present, future

Very ofen use with compound verb:

”To do“ = کردن

”Conversation“ = گفتگو

”To speak“ = گفتگو کردن Translation Quality

Up to date research (2013) made in Colombia University:

Morphological analysis improves results signiﬁcantly

Word order should stil be improved

Example:

از فردا نمی ترسم چراکه دیروز را دیده ام وامروز را دوست دارم :Input

Reference: i ’m not afaid of tomorrow because i have seen yesterday and i like today

Translation: fom tomorrow , not afaid because i have seen yesterday and today i love Example - Google Translate

‌ امریکا میگوید که برخلف ادعای گروه موسوم به America says that contrary to the "دولت اسلمی"، هواپیمای اردنی با شلیک آنها ,"claims of so-caled "Islamic state .سرنگون نشده است Jordanian aircraf to shoot them down yet. روز چهارشنبه این هواپیما در قلمروی تحت نفوذ این گروه شبه نظامی گم شد و خلبانش به اسارت On Wednesday, the aircraf was lost in .آنها در آمد the sphere of inﬂuence of the militant group Khlbansh they were captured. شبه نظامیان "دولت اسلمی" که پیشتر به نام داعش شناخته میشدند، اعلم کرده بودند که با Militant "Islamic state" that را F-16 موشکهای ردیاب توانستند جنگنده ,previously were known as the Dash .سرنگون کنند had announced that the tracer missiles could overthrow F-16 ﬁghter. در مقابل آمریکاییها میگویند "شواهد به وضوح" .نشان میدهد که این ادعا صحیح نیست The Americans said "the evidence clearly" shows that this claim is not true. Translation Tools

Translation preferences: Limited paralel corpuses, high morphology

Corpuses:

TEP: Tehran English-Persian Paralel Corpus

El Kholy et al., 2013a; El Kholy et al., 2013b - 160,000 sentences

Analysis Tools

PerStem: (Jadidinejad et al., 2010) - morphological Segmenter

VerbStem: verb analyzer tool (Bijankhan et al., 2011) References http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Persian_language#Grammar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_grammar

Improved Language Modeling for English-Persian Statistical MachineTranslation: http://www.aclweb.org/ anthology/W10-3810 http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~rasooli/papers/ijcnlp13.pdf