Introducing Minerva – A new system for Machine Translation
Jonathan Levin
Minerva@hisown.com
Abstract
This paper introduces a novel system for ma-
chine translation, code-named "Minerva", and
briefly discusses its design. The source lan-
guage is currently Latin, with several target
language options. Our approach handles mor-
phology and grammar alike, also attempting
semantic disambiguation and context determi-
nation. While there exist few systems to trans-
late Latin, Minerva already displays notewor-
thy results that surpass those of the leading
one. We further claim that our system can,
upon maturity, be adapted in such ways that
can potentially allow it to handle other lan-
guages, as well.
1 Introduction
Machine Translation (MT) is one of the most
challenging areas in NLP research. Many sys-
tems exist, all vying to build a better "Mouse-
Trap", and improve accuracy to a much desired
asymptotic 100%. While most of these systems
focus on contemporary spoken languages, we
have decided to tackle the challenge of translat-
ing Latin (as a source language) into theoreti-
cally any target language. Our system, code-
named "Minerva", is the result.
At the time of writing, the leading system for
Latin MT is "Perseus", developed by Tufts
University and heavily used by Classicists
worldwide. This system, however, falls short of
its vast promise – it focuses solely on the
morphological aspects, often correctly
determining the various possible senses, but
making no real attempt to disambiguate them1 .
Consequently, it is nearly useless in attempting
word combinations and/or full sentences, and
only offers single word lookups at a time.
1
That said, the newest version (4.0) also offers a cor-
pus based "guesstimate" of the most applicable sense,
but solely based on statistics input by human users.
Minerva offers significant advancements
compared to Perseus. With an improved
morphological engine, it correctly deduces more
forms than its "sibling". Additionally, it contains
an elaborate rule-based system to tackle Latin
grammar, providing correct grammatical
disambiguation of senses whenever possible.
Future work will make a foray into semantics, by
integrating Minerva with Princeton University's
"WordNet", thereby attempting to leap over the
most challenging hurdle yet – full word sense
disambiguation. It is important to emphasize that,
while the semantic module is at the time of
writing far from complete, it will not be a
statistical, corpus based approach, but will
attempt true context determination by mimicking
the same associative process in the human brain.
2 A brief primer to Latin
A full discussion of Latin Morphology and
grammar is well beyond the scope of this short
paper. However, we next explain some impor-
tant attributes of the language, as well as the rea-
soning behind its choice.
2.1 Why Latin?
Latin is traditionally treated as a "dead" lan-
guage. Even though its terms and idioms perme-
ate popular domains such as medicine and law,
and indeed even everyday English, its use in the
21st century is extremely limited to specific cir-
cles, most notably classicists.
We prefer to think of Latin as a "frozen"
language, rather than a "dead" one. "Frozen", as
it has, in effect, developed little in the past 1,500
years: As opposed to many of its descendant
Romance languages, Latin vocabulary remains
small, with a relatively straightforward grammar,
predictable exceptions and (what we find to be) a
reasonable degree of semantic ambiguity. In that,
it proves itself to be a worthwhile candidate for
automated translation.
Minerva was thus designed with Latin as the
source language in mind. However, by its very
design the system is modular enough so that the
input module may later be replaced with a differ-
ent one, possibly targeting English, French, or
even non Romance languages such as Hebrew or
Japanese.
2.2 Latin-specific challenges
a. Word Order and declensions
Latin, like Russian, relies heavily on declensions.
As a result, the traditional word order rules from
other languages (Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) in
English/Romance, SOV in most others) do not
apply. While most sentences loosely adopt SOV,
sentences can be constructed in any order, so
there is no real difference between:
Puer amat puellam
Puer puellam amat
Puellam puer amat
Puer: Puer (boy) n., nominative
Puellam: Puella (girl), n., accusative
Amat: amare (love), v., 3rd person sg. Present, indicative/active
And all mean "The boy loves the girl", due to
the use of declensions. The loose word order is
often used in Latin for emphasis on a particular
part of the sentence, especially in poetry.
This proves to be both a blessing and a curse.
On the one hand, the use of declensions can be
used in the process of grammatical disambigua-
tion. On the other, some declined forms are often
identical. These include very commonly encoun-
tered forms2, and in those cases Latin provides an
even greater challenge than other languages with
a rigid word order. Because of declensions, Latin
does not have any determiners and uses preposi-
tions sparsely, thus making common grammati-
cal tasks exceptionally challenging.
2
E.g. Nominative (subject) and Accusative (direct ob-
ject) for neuter, as well as Dative (indirect object) and Abla-
tive (means) for feminine, as well as many others.
b. Grammatical Agreement
Latin relies heavily on agreement between
words, in gender, case and number. This makes it
easy to perform grammatical disambiguation in
many cases, especially where adjectives are
separated from their corresponding nouns.
c. Clauses
Latin uses punctuation sparsely. Commas can-
not be relied upon in determining clauses, which
can also be introduced by myriad prepositions
and/or pronouns. Examples are the prodosis and
apodosis of conditionals, e.g:
si vis pacem para bellum
(“if you want peace, prepare for war”)
Even without punctuation (in between ‘pacem‘
and ‘para’) The use of the conditional (si) and
verb (‘para’) enable a clear separation into two
clauses (“si vis pacem” and “para bellum”)
d. Idiomatic expressions
In many cases, well known idioms can be used
to perform both grammatical and semantic dis-
ambiguation. For example:
quibuscum continenter bellum gerunt
(Caesar, "Gallic War", 1.4)
wherein "bellum" by itself could be either an
adjective ("beautiful") or a noun ("war") and "ge-
runt", while not grammatically ambiguous, is a
verb of many potential interpretations ("to bear
about, bear, carry, wear, have, hold, sustain").
The combination of both, however, is uniquely
determined to be "wage war".
3 System Design
Minerva is highly modular, and treats MT as a
sequence of independent stages, each imple-
mented separately:
# Stage Language Dependent
1 Morphological Analysis Yes
2 Grammatical Analysis Yes
3 Semantic Analysis No
4 Target Language Generation Yes
It's important to emphasize, that while the lan-
guage dependent modules are currently imple-
mented in Latin (1,2) and English/French (4), we
surmise there is no insurmountable challenge in
adapting them to other languages, as well. In this
sense, our claim can be expanded to say that the
semantic analysis and disambiguation is so lan-
guage agnostic that the system should ideally be
able to deduce senses and context irrespective of
choice of the languages involved.
3.1 Morphological Analysis
Minerva performs morphological analysis by
following an XML tree that correctly describes
the Latin syntax. The tree is organized according
to endings, and its hierarchical structure easily
leads to determining possible meanings of end-
ings. Rather than follow a greedy approach, all
possible endings are considered (including par-
tial ones) from which the base form candidate is
proposed. A dictionary lookup ensues, and – if
the candidate is found – it is added to the possi-
ble meanings of the word.
Additionally, Minerva maintains separate lists
of exceptional verbs and noun forms, to handle
the numerous (yet finite) cases wherein words
are declined in non-standard, or alternate forms.
This stage is fully debugged and tested, and is
thus on par with "Perseus", and even exceeds it –
as it correctly recognizes many forms the former
does not.
The output of this phase is an array of all the
possible meanings of a given word. Meanings are
disambiguated at the grammatical level only, e.g.
si vis pacem, para bellum
(if you want peace, prepare for war)
vis:vis, n/sg/f/gen (force,vigor, etc)
vis:vis, n/sg/f/nom (force,vigor, etc)
vis:velle, v/2nd/sg/pres/ind/act (to want)
..
bellum: bellum, n/sg/n/nom (war)
bellum: bellum, n/sg/n/acc (war)
bellum: bellus, adj/sg/m/acc (pretty)
bellum: bellus, adj/sg/n/acc (pretty)
..
Obviously including wrong meanings, and
choosing to defer semantic ambiguities (in the
above case “vis” as a noun can specifically mean
any of force, vigor, power, or energy) to the se-
mantic analysis stage.
3.2 Grammatical Analysis
Latin has a surprisingly rich and diverse
grammar, but it mostly falls into well followed
rules. The Grammatical Analysis module thus
implements a classical rule-based system.
Grammar rules are defined in a simple, yet ef-
fective language that makes use of conditionals
and word attributes to form pattern matching ex-
pressions. Ambiguities in word senses are han-
dled by means of reducing multiple senses to a
simple character representation, upon which a
regular expression may be applied and tested.
Rules are defined in one of several classes
(mandatory, common, unusual), and evaluated by
order. Additionally, when a given meaning of a
word is discarded due to the application of a rule,
the system keeps track of its decision.
A "mandatory" rule class is one wherein the
system will try to enforce the rule, eliminating
the possible senses of the word in case which fail
to match it. In a way, it mimics human expecta-
tion. Much like in English one would expect cer-
tain parts of speech to follow others (say,
nouns/adjectives after determiners), so too does
Minerva anticipate certain declensions to follow
prepositions, and such. If a mismatched manda-
tory rule results in the elimination of the last pos-
sible sense of a given word, Minerva rejects the
sentence as ungrammatical.
A "common" rule class is one wherein the sys-
tem expects a common, yet not necessarily strict
pattern to occur in a sentence. These rules are
"nice-to-have", yet can be violated.
An "unusual" rule class groups grammatical
constructs that are not found in common prose or
speech, but do occur in rare cases, most often
poetry. These rules are thus tagged to allow their
consideration only in special cases, wherein pre-
vious processing has proven insufficient, or the
text source is known to be poetry.
Minerva processes rules recursively, and in
order, according to a simple algorithm:
For ruleClass in Classes
TryAgain = True
While (TryAgain)
TryAgain = False
For rule in rules[ruleClass]
If isApplicable(rule, sentence)
apply(rule, sentence)
TryAgain = true

The application of the current rule set on
our example sentence yields:
vis:vis, n/sg/f/gen (force,vigor, etc)
vis:vis, n/sg/f/nom (force,vigor, etc)
vis:velle, v/2nd/sg/pres/ind/act (to want)
..
bellum: bellum, n/sg/n/nom (war)
bellum: bellum, n/sg/n/acc (war)
bellum: bellus, adj/sg/m/acc (pretty)
bellum: bellus, adj/sg/n/acc (pretty)
Note that, at this stage, while we have
eliminated some of the semantic ambiguity
(namely, of “vis”), we still cannot determine
“bellum” to be “war” and not “pretty”.
3.3 Semantic Analysis
Semantic analysis is, at this time, not fully im-
plemented. Dictionary meanings, however, are
already tied to "WordNet", allowing for the con-
sideration of specific meanings, and future dis-
ambiguation. This process, however, is currently
left out of scope of the present implementation
and, thus, this paper. This paper is proposed as a
short talk submission, which will focus on the
semantic challenges foreseen. In our example
sentence, semantic disambiguation will enable
Minerva to deduce that “war” is a more likely
meaning for “bellum” than “pretty” is – since the
former is an antonym of “peace”, and the latter is
an adjective used substantively.
3.4 Target Language Generation
While the default target language is English,
Minerva maintains a "sense table" as a proof of
concept, mapping English senses into corre-
sponding ones in Hebrew, French and Japanese
(the choices of languages being half-arbitrary, as
they are the ones known by the authors – but also
provide representations of three distinct language
classes).
Many multi-lingual Machine Translation sys-
tems use an intermediate interlingua stage. Mi-
nerva does not do this directly, but rather relies
on the unique senses of words, as determined by
the previous stage of semantic analysis. Under
the assumption the ambiguous senses of the word
can be eliminated, leaving one unique sense, we
claim that there exist mappings of that sense to
any target language (different mappings for dif-
ferent languages). We further claim that this
mapping is injective (possibly surjective - i.e. a
bijection) onto the target language space. For
example, Latin “malus” would translate as:
Latin: malus
English: apple#1 (apple%1:13:00::)
French: pomme
Hebrew: ‫תפוח‬
Etc.
Once the target language noun, verb or part-
of-speech base form is determined, the language
generation module correctly conjugates or de-
clines it. Finally, word ordering is enforced. Re-
sults leave some to be desired, but are quite satis-
factory.
4 Implementation Details
Minerva is implemented with the following tech-
nologies/platforms:
Platform Use
Java Main System Logic
MySQL Database, dictionaries
PHP Web 2.0 Front End
The system output is all natively in XML format,
allowing for use and integration with other sys-
tems as a web service. Human readable output is
performed by means of XSL rendering, which
converts the output into an X/HTML 1.1 con-
formant standard.
5 Final Notes
Minerva is still very much in a nascent stage, and
is a work in progress. It has, however, reached a
degree of maturity in the sense that it could al-
ready benefit Latin speakers and classicists. It is
the aim of this paper, and the presentation pro-
posed, to spread the word of its existence to as
wide an audience as is possible, so as to boost its
usage, as well as its evolution.
The system’s main drawback, at present, is its
rather limited dictionary. A simple web 2.0 inter-
face allows it to query its users (effectively “ask-
ing for help”) to input base forms of new words
encountered in translation. It is the authors’
hope, that, with more use, Minerva’s dictionary
will be expanded organically by its users - in-
creasing, its turn – its efficiency and appeal to
new users.
References
Tufts, Perseus - http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
Princeton, Wordnet - http://wordnet.princeton.edu/