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<Paper uid="C00-2142">
  <Title>Rapid Development of Translation Tools: Application to Persian and Turkish</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="985" end_page="985" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The development of automatic machine translation systems for several languages is a complicated task, even more so if it has to be done in a short amount of time. We have shown how the availability of a machine translation environment based on contemporary computational linguistic theories and using a sound system design aids a linguist in building a complete system, starting out with relatively silnple tasks as word-for-word translation and increlnentally increasing the complexity and capabilities of the system. Using the current library of modules, it is possible to achieve a level of quality on par with the best transfer-based MT systems. Some of the strong points of the system are: (1) The system can be used by a linguist with reasonable knowledge of computational linguistics and does not require specific programming skills. (2) It can be easily configured for building a variety of applications, including a complete MT system, by reusing a library of generic modular components. (3) It supports an increlnental develol)ment methodology which allows to develop a system in a step-wise fashion and enables to deliver rumfing systems early in the development cycle. (4) Based on the experiences in building the MT systems mentioned in the paper, we estimate that a team of one linguist and three lexicographers can build a basic transfer-based MT system with medium-size coverage (dictionary of 50,000 headwords, all most fi'equent syntactic constructions in the language) in less than a year.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> One major improve,nent of the system would be a nmre integrated test and debug cycle linked to a corpus and to a database of test items. Although existing testing methodologies and tools could be used (l)auphin E., 1996; Judith Klein and Wegst, 1998), building test sets is a rather time-consulning task and some new approach to testing supporting rapid development of MT systems with an emphasis on wide coverage would be needed.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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