Machine Translation Models: Progress and Challenges
Machine translation (MT) involves automatically converting text from one language into another using computer algorithms. MT has advanced considerably but still faces accuracy and fluency challenges. A key difficulty is handling divergent word orders across languages. For example, most Polynesian languages like Tongan have VSO (Verb-Subject-Object) as their basic order, while languages like English are SVO languages.
But Tongan also allows VOS word order in certain contexts. The relationship between VSO and VOS orders has been analyzed in different ways. One proposal suggests VOS derives from leftward object shift over the subject to a focus position. However, evidence indicates the subject is displaced rightward in VOS, not the object leftward.