Proceedings of the COLING 2004 Post Conference Workshop on Multilingual Linguistic Ressources MLR2004

International audienceIn an ever expanding information society, most information systems are now facing the "multilingual challenge". Multilingual language resources play an essential role in modern information systems. Such resources need to provide information on many languages in a common framework and should be (re)usable in many applications (for automatic or human use). Many centres have been involved in national and international projects dedicated to building har- monised language resources and creating expertise in the maintenance and further development of standardised linguistic data. These resources include dictionaries, lexicons, thesauri, word-nets, and annotated corpora developed along the lines of best practices and recommendations. However, since the late 90's, most efforts in scaling up these resources remain the responsibility of the local authorities, usually, with very low funding (if any) and few opportunities for academic recognition of this work. Hence, it is not surprising that many of the resource holders and developers have become reluctant to give free access to the latest versions of their resources, and their actual status is therefore currently rather unclear. The goal of this workshop is to study problems involved in the development, management and reuse of lexical resources in a multilingual context. Moreover, this workshop provides a forum for reviewing the present state of language resources. The workshop is meant to bring to the international community qualitative and quantitative information about the most recent developments in the area of linguistic resources and their use in applications. The impressive number of submissions (38) to this workshop and in other workshops and conferences dedicated to similar topics proves that dealing with multilingual linguistic ressources has become a very hot problem in the Natural Language Processing community. To cope with the number of submissions, the workshop organising committee decided to accept 16 papers from 10 countries based on the reviewers' recommendations. Six of these papers will be presented in a poster session. The papers constitute a representative selection of current trends in research on Multilingual Language Resources, such as multilingual aligned corpora, bilingual and multilingual lexicons, and multilingual speech resources. The papers also represent a characteristic set of approaches to the development of multilingual language resources, such as automatic extraction of information from corpora, combination and re-use of existing resources, online collaborative development of multilingual lexicons, and use of the Web as a multilingual language resource. The development and management of multilingual language resources is a long-term activity in which collaboration among researchers is essential. We hope that this workshop will gather many researchers involved in such developments and will give them the opportunity to discuss, exchange, compare their approaches and strengthen their collaborations in the field. The organisation of this workshop would have been impossible without the hard work of the program committee who managed to provide accurate reviews on time, on a rather tight schedule. We would also like to thank the Coling 2004 organising committee that made this workshop possible. Finally, we hope that this workshop will yield fruitful results for all participants

Designing Statistical Language Learners: Experiments on Noun Compounds

The goal of this thesis is to advance the exploration of the statistical language learning design space. In pursuit of that goal, the thesis makes two main theoretical contributions: (i) it identifies a new class of designs by specifying an architecture for natural language analysis in which probabilities are given to semantic forms rather than to more superficial linguistic elements; and (ii) it explores the development of a mathematical theory to predict the expected accuracy of statistical language learning systems in terms of the volume of data used to train them. The theoretical work is illustrated by applying statistical language learning designs to the analysis of noun compounds. Both syntactic and semantic analysis of noun compounds are attempted using the proposed architecture. Empirical comparisons demonstrate that the proposed syntactic model is significantly better than those previously suggested, approaching the performance of human judges on the same task, and that the proposed semantic model, the first statistical approach to this problem, exhibits significantly better accuracy than the baseline strategy. These results suggest that the new class of designs identified is a promising one. The experiments also serve to highlight the need for a widely applicable theory of data requirements.Comment: PhD thesis (Macquarie University, Sydney; December 1995), LaTeX source, xii+214 page

The head-modifier principle and multilingual term extraction

Advances in Language Engineering may be dependent on theoretical principles originating from linguistics since both share a common object of enquiry, natural language structures. We outline an approach to term extraction that rests on theoretical claims about the structure of words. We use the structural properties of compound words to specifically elicit the sets of terms defined by type hierarchies such as hyponymy and meronymy. The theoretical claims revolve around the head-modifier principle which determines the formation of a major class of compounds. Significantly it has been suggested that the principle operates in languages other than English. To demonstrate the extendibility of our approach beyond English, we present a case study of term extraction in Chinese, a language whose written form is the vehicle of communication for over 1.3 billion language users, and therefore has great significance for the development of language engineering technologies

Evaluation of an Esperanto-Based Interlingua Multilingual Survey Form Machine Translation Mechanism Incorporating a Sublanguage Translation Methodolgy

Translation costs restrict the preparation of medical survey and other questionnaires for migrant communities in Western Australia. This restriction is compounded by a lack of affordable and accurate machine translation mechanisms. This research investigated and evaluated combined strategies intended to provide an efficacious and affordable machine translator by: • using an interlingua or pivot-language that requires less resources for its construction than contemporary systems and has the additional benefit of significant error reduction; and • defining smaller lexical environments to restrict data, thereby reducing the complexity of translation rules and enhancing correct semantic transfer between natural languages. This research focussed on producing a prototype machine translation mechanism that would accept questionnaire texts as discrete questions and suggested answers from which a respondent may select. The prototype was designed to accept non-ambiguous English as the source language, translate it to a pivot-language or interlingua, Esperanto, and thence to a selected target language, French. Subsequently, a reverse path of translation from the target language back to the source language enabled validation of minimal or zero change in both syntax and semantics of the original input. Jade, an object-oriented (00) database application, hosting the relationship between the natural languages and the interlingua, was used to facilitate the accurate transfer of meaning between the natural languages. Translation, interpretation and validation of sample texts was undertaken by linguists qualified in English, French and Esperanto. Translation output from the prototype model was compared, again with assistance from linguists, with a \u27control\u27 model, the SYSTRAN On-Line Translator, a more traditional transfer translation product. Successful completion of this research constitutes a step towards an increased availability of low cost machine translation to assist in the development of reliable and efficient survey translation systems for use in specific user environments. These environments include, but arc not exclusive to, medical, hospital and Australian indigenous-contact environments

Formulaic language

The notion of formulaicity has received increasing attention in disciplines and areas as diverse as linguistics, literary studies, art theory and art history. In recent years, linguistic studies of formulaicity have been flourishing and the very notion of formulaicity has been approached from various methodological and theoretical perspectives and with various purposes in mind. The linguistic approach to formulaicity is still in a state of rapid development and the objective of the current volume is to present the current explorations in the field. Papers collected in the volume make numerous suggestions for further development of the field and they are arranged into three complementary parts. The first part, with three chapters, presents new theoretical and methodological insights as well as their practical application in the development of custom-designed software tools for identification and exploration of formulaic language in texts. Two papers in the second part explore formulaic language in the context of language learning. Finally, the third part, with three chapters, showcases descriptive research on formulaic language conducted primarily from the perspectives of corpus linguistics and translation studies. The volume will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of formulaic language either from a theoretical or a practical perspective

Theories and methods

The notion of formulaicity has received increasing attention in disciplines and areas as diverse as linguistics, literary studies, art theory and art history. In recent years, linguistic studies of formulaicity have been flourishing and the very notion of formulaicity has been approached from various methodological and theoretical perspectives and with various purposes in mind. The linguistic approach to formulaicity is still in a state of rapid development and the objective of the current volume is to present the current explorations in the field. Papers collected in the volume make numerous suggestions for further development of the field and they are arranged into three complementary parts. The first part, with three chapters, presents new theoretical and methodological insights as well as their practical application in the development of custom-designed software tools for identification and exploration of formulaic language in texts. Two papers in the second part explore formulaic language in the context of language learning. Finally, the third part, with three chapters, showcases descriptive research on formulaic language conducted primarily from the perspectives of corpus linguistics and translation studies. The volume will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of formulaic language either from a theoretical or a practical perspective

Can humain association norm evaluate latent semantic analysis?

This paper presents the comparison of word association norm created by a psycholinguistic experiment to association lists generated by algorithms operating on text corpora. We compare lists generated by Church and Hanks algorithm and lists generated by LSA algorithm. An argument is presented on how those automatically generated lists reflect real semantic relations