Page 1 Word Agreement and Ordering in English-Arabic Machine Translation Tengku Mohd Sembok, Mohammed Abu Shugier University of Malaysian National Defence(UPNM),National University of Malaysia (UKM) tmtsembok@gmail.com Faculty of Info. Science and Technology, National Univ. of Malaysia, Bangi, 43600, Selangor, Malaysia mohd.abushugier@taylors.edu.my ABSTRACT Machine Translation (MT) has been defined as the process that utilizes computer software to translate text from one natural language to another. This definition involves accounting for the grammatical structure of each language and using rules and grammars to transfer the grammatical structure of the source language (SL) into the target language (TL). Word agreement and ordering play an important part in the process. MT should handle agreement between the subject and verb where the number, gender, person and features of the subject are important factors in the derivation of the verb as well as the features of the verb itself. Other agreements are required between the adjectives and the nouns where Arabic adjectives depend on the number, gender and person as well as the definiteness and indefiniteness of the nouns. Some other agreements also exist between the numbers and the countable nouns. The paper represents a rule-based approach in English to Arabic MT and emphasis is given in handling of word agreement and ordering. The methodology is flexible and scalable, the main advantages are: first, it is a rule-based approach, and second, it can be applied on some other languages with minor modifications. I. INTRODUCTION Agreement is a basic property of language. In the most basic sense, agreement occurs when two elements in the appropriate configuration exhibit morphology consistent with their cooccurrence. Perhaps the most transparent case of this linguistic mechanism is number agreement between a subject and a verb: A singular noun in the subject position regularly co- occurs with a singular verb (e.g., “the dog runs”), and a plural subject noun regularly co-occurs with a plural verb (e.g., “the dogs run”). If the language has number marking on other elements, such as determiners or adjectives, these should also exhibit morphology that is consistent with their Relationship to the subject head noun, and this co-occurrence relationship holds for gender and person agreement as well. Arabic were researched in the early days of machine translation, the language has always been considered due to its morphological, syntactic, phonetic and phonologic properties which is one of the most difficult languages for written and spoken processing (Boualem 2003). The same author continues to state then, call for papers for a major conference on Arabic Language processing research started in the 1970s, even before the problems of Arabic text editing were completely solved. The first studies focused primarily on lexicons and morphology. In the past ten years, the internationalisation of the world wide web (WWW) and the proliferation of communication tools in Arabic have led to the need for a large number of Arabic natural language processing (NLP) applications. As a result, research activity has extended to address more general areas of Arabic language processing, including syntactic analysis, machine translation, document indexing, and information retrieval. Next section will exhibit some of these aspects that may contain an anticipated problem(s) in the translation to Arabic. II. AGREEMENT AND WORD ORDERING PROBLEMS IN MT In this section we will explore different areas that are expected to cause agreement and ordering problems during translation from English into Arabic. To show how a certain grammatical phenomenon causes an agreement problem, we will make use of test suite ‘independent examples’ (Systran 2007). A. ADJECTIVE-NOUN AGREEMENT This type of agreement is not found in English. Arabic however, requires that the adjectives agree in number gender, case and definiteness with nouns. In agreement, definiteness has a role to play: it is one of the features of agreement between adjectives and the nouns they modify. In Arabic, a noun may or may not have an article, But if the noun has one so must an attributive adjective. This is