Towards UNL-based machine translation for Moroccan Amazigh language

摘要

Amazigh languages, also called Berber, belong to the Afro-Asiatic languages (Hamito-Semitic) family. They are a family of similar and closely related languages and dialects indigenous to North Africa. They are spoken in Morocco, Algeria, and some populations in Libya, Tunisia, northern Mali, western and northern Niger, northern Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and in the Siwa Oasis of Egypt. Large Berber-speaking migrant communities have been living in Western Europe since the 1950s. In this paper, we study the Standard Moroccan Amazigh. It became a constitutionally official language of Morocco, in 2011. However, it is still considered as a less resourced language. So, it is time to develop linguistic resources and applications for processing automatically this language, in order to ensure its survival and promotion by integrating it into the new information and communication technologies (NICT). In this context and in the perspective to produce a Universal Networking Language (UNL) based machine translation system for this language, we have undertaken the creation of the Amazigh-UNL dictionary, as a first step of linguistic resources' development required by the UNL system to achieve translation. Thus, this paper is focused on presenting linguistic features' implementation such as morphological, syntactical and semantic information of the Amazigh language.