HOWTO Write a sentence-building program?

Question

Hi everyone,
I'm a programming enthusiast studying Linguistics. I've been toying with an idea for a side project and I'd like your input on a few points. I want to write a program that reads user input, matches it with noun and verb repertoires and builds grammatical sentences in French.
Sample entries, stored in separate files:
== common nouns ==
maison; fs; maisons; fp;
enfant; ms; enfants; mp;
cheval; ms; chevaux; mp;
== intransitive verbs ==
manger; mange; manges; mange; mangeons; mangez; mangent;
exploser; explose; exploses; explose; explosons; explosez; explosent;
dormir; dors; dors; dort; dormons; dormez; dorment;
A user would, for instance, select 'chevaux' and 'manger' and the program would read the gender and number (masculine, plural), pick the appropriate article and conjugate the verb accordingly by printing: Les chevaux mangent. Eventually I'd like to expand entries to allow for more complex sentences like Les chevaux mangent bruyamment les carottes que le fermier leur a offertes.
I'd also integrate syntactic and semantic data so that the program can assess the sentence's grammaticality.
That part is all fine and dandy, but I'm not exactly sure how to get started. I have some knowledge of C and Java and I'm willing to learn (a) new language(s) if necessary.
My questions are:
What language would you recommend for this? I'd like to build a GUI at some point but it's definitely not a priority.
What format (CSV, XML, etc.) should I use to store lexical units? I've read good things about XML as far as readability and parsing goes, but it seems to be less efficient with large datasets. I don't expect my repertoires to grow that much but you never know! :-)
I'm also open to IDE/text editor recommendations. I've been using geany for C and Eclipse for Java.
Thanks in advance for reading and/or replying. I look forward to your input.

Answer 1

I assume you've explored the background:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation
From my general impression machine translation is a hard problem.  Having a key:item translation dictionary is the easy part.  The difficulty is idioms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom
A literal word-to-word translation often does not fit into the destination language as the meanings are not carried by the individual words but instead the phrases have special meaning culturally which is different per culture.
For example, the TV show "Big Brother" has an Orwellian meaning in the west and that is something we understand culturally.  However when an equivalent show was made for middle-eastern audiences that idiom is not developed there so the name of the show, roughly translated, was "The Boss."  The semantics are near each other in domain but the exact translation is not possible because the underlying meanings are not equivalent between the cultures.
Anyway, if you figure out machine translation there are a few hundred million dollars waiting for you..
Edit: And I believe I misunderstood you?  You are not looking for translation?
Last edited by headkase (2013-02-01 17:02:06)