Compared to well-resourced languages such as English and Dutch, natural language processing (NLP) tools for Afrikaans are still not abundant. In the context of the AfriBooms project, KU Leuven and the North-West University collaborated to develop a first, small treebank, a dependency parser, and an easy to use online linguistic search engine for Afrikaans for use by researchers and students in the humanities and social sciences. The search tool is based on a similar development for Dutch, i.e. GrETEL, a user-friendly search engine which allows users to query a treebank by means of a natural language example instead of a formal search instruction.

In this paper we describe the METIS-II system and its evaluation on each of the language pairs: Dutch, German, Greek, and Spanish to English. The METIS-II system envisaged developing a data-driven approach in which no parallel corpus is required, and in which no full parser or extensive rule sets are needed. We describe evalution on a development test set and on a test set coming from Europarl, and compare our results with SYSTRAN. We also provide some further analysis, researching the impact of the number and source of the reference translations and analysing the results according to test text type. The results are expectably lower for the METIS system, but not at an unatainable distance from a mature system like SYSTRAN.

The METIS-II project is an example-based machine translation system, making use of minimal resources and tools for both source and target language, making use of a target-language (TL) corpus, but not of any parallel corpora. In the current paper, we discuss the view of our team on the general philosophy and outline of the METIS-II system.

For the METIS-II project (IST, start: 10-2004 – end: 09-2007) we are working on an example-based machine translation system, making use of minimal resources and tools for both source and target language, i.e. making use of a target language corpus, but not of any parallel corpora. In the current paper, we present the results of the first experiments with our approach (CCL) within the METIS consortium : the translation of noun phrases from Dutch to English, using the British National Corpus as a target language corpus. Future research is planned along similar lines for the sentence as is presented here for the noun phrase.