Improving the translation environment for professional translators

When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side. This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project

In no uncertain terms : a dataset for monolingual and multilingual automatic term extraction from comparable corpora

Automatic term extraction is a productive field of research within natural language processing, but it still faces significant obstacles regarding datasets and evaluation, which require manual term annotation. This is an arduous task, made even more difficult by the lack of a clear distinction between terms and general language, which results in low inter-annotator agreement. There is a large need for well-documented, manually validated datasets, especially in the rising field of multilingual term extraction from comparable corpora, which presents a unique new set of challenges. In this paper, a new approach is presented for both monolingual and multilingual term annotation in comparable corpora. The detailed guidelines with different term labels, the domain- and language-independent methodology and the large volumes annotated in three different languages and four different domains make this a rich resource. The resulting datasets are not just suited for evaluation purposes but can also serve as a general source of information about terms and even as training data for supervised methods. Moreover, the gold standard for multilingual term extraction from comparable corpora contains information about term variants and translation equivalents, which allows an in-depth, nuanced evaluation

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems

ELECTRONIC CORPORA IN TRANSLATION BOOTCAT-BOOTSTRAPPING CORPORA AND TERMS FROM THE WEB

In the new world of technology, the translation profession, like other disciplines, cannot be deprived of modern tools such as electronic corpora. Recently, large monolingual, comparable and parallel corpora have played a crucial role in solving various problems of linguistics, including translation. During recent years, a large number of studies within the discipline of translation studies have focused on corpora and their applications in translation classes. Such studies mainly look into the kind of information trainee translators can elicit from corpora and the effect of using corpus data on the quality of translations produced. Corpora, however, have a lot more to offer to both translation teachers and translation students. Corpus-based translation classrooms, by their very nature, can offer considerable advantages far beyond what traditional translation classes have to offer. This article, in fact, aims to elaborate on advantages of using corpora in translation classrooms for teachers and students of translation. Furthermore, we present types of corpora and a new method of compiling specialized corpora- BootCaT.BOOTCAT, BOOTSTRAPPING

The lexico-phraseology of THE and A/AN in spoken English: a corpus-based study

The English articles (THE, A, AN) are normally described in terms of the grammar of the language. This is only natural, since they are extremely frequent, fit into certain well-defined syntactic slots, and usually help to communicate only very broad aspects of textual meaning. However, as John Sinclair has pointed out (1999, pp.160-161), the articles are also found as components of many lexico-phraseological units, and in such cases a normal grammatical description may not be of relevance. An example he gives is the presence of A in the phrase 'come to a head', where ‘A has little more status than that of a letter of the alphabet’ (p.161). Sinclair also makes the observation that, ‘I do not know of an estimate of the proportion of instances of A, for example, that are not a realisation of the choice of article but of the realisation of part of a multi-word expression.’ (p.161). The present paper addresses the questions raised by Sinclair, and does so with reference to both the definite and the indefinite article. It focuses, in particular, on the spoken language, and presents the results of analyses of random samples of the articles in the spoken component of the British National Corpus (hereafter BNC-spkn). According to the data in Leech et al (2001, p.144), THE is the most frequent word in BNC-spkn and A is the sixth most frequent (a rank position which remains unaltered when the frequencies of A and AN are combined). Using the BNCweb interface, and specifying that the relevant word forms should be ‘articles’, the total numbers of tokens are: an 19,049; a 200,004; the 409,060. Since the numbers are very high, the samples investigated also contained a reasonably large number of tokens (500). The relative samples corresponded to the following proportions of tokens in BNC-spkn: an 2.62%, a 0.25%, the 0.12%. The latter two are very low percentages, and for this reason, three separate samples of each were investigated, in order to see the extent to which the samples differed. Analysis of article usage was carried out in the first instance by reading right-sorted concordance lines. Whenever doubts arose, larger contexts were retrieved from the corpus. Various reference works were also consulted, including Berry (1993), Francis et al (1998), and various corpus-based dictionaries and grammars. The data presented includes: description of the various types of lexico-phraseological unit found; the proportions of the samples judged to involve the different lexico-phraseological phenomena identified; the problems encountered when deciding whether or not phraseology is an important factor in specific instances of article usage; and the number of tokens in each sample which were in some way irrelevant, for example because they involved speaker repetition of the article, or the non-completion of a noun phrase

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

Towards a Universal Wordnet by Learning from Combined Evidenc

Lexical databases are invaluable sources of knowledge about words and their meanings, with numerous applications in areas like NLP, IR, and AI. We propose a methodology for the automatic construction of a large-scale multilingual lexical database where words of many languages are hierarchically organized in terms of their meanings and their semantic relations to other words. This resource is bootstrapped from WordNet, a well-known English-language resource. Our approach extends WordNet with around 1.5 million meaning links for 800,000 words in over 200 languages, drawing on evidence extracted from a variety of resources including existing (monolingual) wordnets, (mostly bilingual) translation dictionaries, and parallel corpora. Graph-based scoring functions and statistical learning techniques are used to iteratively integrate this information and build an output graph. Experiments show that this wordnet has a high level of precision and coverage, and that it can be useful in applied tasks such as cross-lingual text classification