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.