GeoCLEF 2007: the CLEF 2007 cross-language geographic information retrieval track overview

GeoCLEF ran as a regular track for the second time within the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2007. The purpose of GeoCLEF is to test and evaluate cross-language geographic information retrieval (GIR): retrieval for topics with a geographic specification. GeoCLEF 2007 consisted of two sub tasks. A search task ran for the third time and a query classification task was organized for the first. For the GeoCLEF 2007 search task, twenty-five search topics were defined by the organizing groups for searching English, German, Portuguese and Spanish document collections. All topics were translated into English, Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish and German. Several topics in 2007 were geographically challenging. Thirteen groups submitted 108 runs. The groups used a variety of approaches. For the classification task, a query log from a search engine was provided and the groups needed to identify the queries with a geographic scope and the geographic components within the local queries

CLEF 2005: Ad Hoc track overview

We describe the objectives and organization of the CLEF 2005 ad hoc track and discuss the main characteristics of the tasks offered to test monolingual, bilingual and multilingual textual document retrieval. The performance achieved for each task is presented and a preliminary analysis of results is given. The paper focuses in particular on the multilingual tasks which reused the test collection created in CLEF 2003 in an attempt to see if an improvement in system performance over time could be measured, and also to examine the multilingual results merging problem

An evaluation resource for geographic information retrieval

In this paper we present an evaluation resource for geographic information retrieval developed within the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The GeoCLEF track is dedicated to the evaluation of geographic information retrieval systems. The resource encompasses more than 600,000 documents, 75 topics so far, and more than 100,000 relevance judgments for these topics. Geographic information retrieval requires an evaluation resource which represents realistic information needs and which is geographically challenging. Some experimental results and analysis are reported

An evaluation resource for Geographical Information Retrieval

In this paper we present an evaluation resource for geographic information retrieval developed within the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The GeoCLEF track is dedicated to the evaluation of geographic information retrieval systems. The resource encompasses more than 600,000 documents, 75 topics so far, and more than 100,000 relevance judgments for these topics. Geographic information retrieval requires an evaluation resource which represents realistic information needs and which is geographically challenging. Some experimental results and analysis are reported

Easy Language Research

This volume presents new approaches in Easy Language research from three different perspectives: text perspective, user perspective and translation perspective. It explores the field of comprehensibility-enhanced varieties at different levels (Easy Language, Plain Language, Easy Language Plus). While all are possible solutions to foster communicative inclusion of people with disabilities, they have varying impacts with regard to their comprehensibility and acceptability. The papers in this volume provide insights into the current scientific activities and results of two research teams at the Universities of Hildesheim and Mainz and present innovative theoretical and empirical perspectives on Easy Language research. The approaches comprise studies on the cognitive processing of Easy Language, on Easy Language in multimodal and multicodal texts and different situational settings as well as translatological considerations on Easy Language translation and interpreting

Annotation, exploitation and evaluation of parallel corpora

Exchange between the translation studies and the computational linguistics communities has traditionally not been very intense. Among other things, this is reflected by the different views on parallel corpora. While computational linguistics does not always strictly pay attention to the translation direction (e.g. when translation rules are extracted from (sub)corpora which actually only consist of translations), translation studies are amongst other things concerned with exactly comparing source and target texts (e.g. to draw conclusions on interference and standardization effects). However, there has recently been more exchange between the two fields – especially when it comes to the annotation of parallel corpora. This special issue brings together the different research perspectives. Its contributions show – from both perspectives – how the communities have come to interact in recent years

Cross-linguistic metaphor intelligibility between English and German

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT, Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff, 1983, 1987, 1993, 2008, 2009), the most prominent cognitive approach to metaphor comprehension, argues that the nature of interconnections within the conceptual system is inherently metaphoric-analogical and that systematic patterns in linguistic metaphor reveal these cognitive interconnections. Relevance Theory (RT, Sperber & Wilson, 1986; Wilson & Sperber, 1993; Sperber & Wilson, 1995; Wilson & Sperber, 2002, 2004) and Graded Salience (GS, Giora, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003; Peleg et al., 2008; Peleg & Giora, 2011) disagree that systematic patterns in linguistic metaphor can be taken as direct evidence of their cognitive representation. A metaphor consists of two concepts, a source and a target concept. The metaphor implies an analogy between the two concepts. To comprehend a metaphor is to infer under which conditions the implied analogy holds. The meaning of the two concepts is pragmatically enriched by these additional assumptions. Metaphor comprehension is an inferential process. The result of this process is the enriched meaning of the metaphor. This meaning can become conventionalised, in which case it often serves as an inferential shortcut: instead of having to consider all conceptually possible interpretations and their plausibility in the context of the analogy, speakers who are familiar with the conventional (i.e. idiomatic) meaning are provided with a default interpretation. According to CMT, the inferential process is a process of interconnecting primary embodied concepts to ever more complex higher-order concepts. On this view, a metaphoric idiomatic meaning is such a complex concept where the conceptual interconnections are conventional. According to RT, the inferential process is a process of inferring a meaning that is in line with the speaker's communicative intent, the discourse context, and interlocutors' expectations of the cognitive relevance of potential inferences. On this view, metaphoric idiomatic meanings are highly salient inferences with a high degree of contextual relevance because speakers' expectations of relevance are conventionalised. According to GS, the inferential process consists of two modules that work in parallel: a module that infers salient meanings based on linguistic knowledge and a module that enriches the meaning by taking non-linguistic knowledge such as conceptual, experiential, perceptual, contextual, and world knowledge into consideration. On this view, metaphoric idiomatic meanings are highly salient inferences because of speakers' knowledge of non-conceptual linguistic conventions. This thesis investigates the claims made by CMT, RT and GS by experimentally testing the cross-linguistic communicability of metaphoric proverbs with idiomatic meanings. Proverbs are selected such that the similarity of metaphors' source and target concepts, expectations of contextual relevance, and the degree of familiarity with proverbs' conventional wording is cross-linguistically maximised. If CMT is correct, then when cross-linguistic conceptual similarity is maximised in this way, monolingual native speakers should find L2 language-specific metaphors communicable. If RT and GS are correct, then monolingual native speakers should find L2-specific metaphors less communicable than L1-specific and non-language-specific metaphoric proverbs because they lack knowledge of the necessary non-conceptual linguistic conventions. Cross-linguistic metaphor communicability is measured in three ways in the experiments: (1) through reading/response times, (2) through plausibility judgements, and (3) through a context creation task. Results show that cross-linguistic metaphor communicability of L2-specific metaphors is lowered for monolingual native speakers on all three measures

Geographic information extraction from texts

A large volume of unstructured texts, containing valuable geographic information, is available online. This information – provided implicitly or explicitly – is useful not only for scientific studies (e.g., spatial humanities) but also for many practical applications (e.g., geographic information retrieval). Although large progress has been achieved in geographic information extraction from texts, there are still unsolved challenges and issues, ranging from methods, systems, and data, to applications and privacy. Therefore, this workshop will provide a timely opportunity to discuss the recent advances, new ideas, and concepts but also identify research gaps in geographic information extraction

The future of dialects: Selected papers from Methods in Dialectology XV

Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants’ speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world. The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada