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

Using Parallel Texts and Lexicons for Verbal Word Sense Disambiguation

We present a system for verbal Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) that is able to exploit additional information from parallel texts and lexicons. It is an extension of our previous WSD method, which gave promising results but used only monolingual features. In the follow-up work described here, we have explored two additional ideas: using English-Czech bilingual resources (as features only - the task itself remains a monolingual WSD task), and using a 'hybrid' approach, adding features extracted both from a parallel corpus and from manually aligned bilingual valency lexicon entries, which contain subcategorization information. Albeit not all types of features proved useful, both ideas and additions have led to significant improvements for both languages explored

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

A Survey of Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment Methods

Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information. Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract pairs of natural language expressions, such that a human who reads (and trusts) the first element of a pair would most likely infer that the other element is also true. Paraphrasing can be seen as bidirectional textual entailment and methods from the two areas are often similar. Both kinds of methods are useful, at least in principle, in a wide range of natural language processing applications, including question answering, summarization, text generation, and machine translation. We summarize key ideas from the two areas by considering in turn recognition, generation, and extraction methods, also pointing to prominent articles and resources.Comment: Technical Report, Natural Language Processing Group, Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece, 201

Identification of Fertile Translations in Medical Comparable Corpora: a Morpho-Compositional Approach

This paper defines a method for lexicon in the biomedical domain from comparable corpora. The method is based on compositional translation and exploits morpheme-level translation equivalences. It can generate translations for a large variety of morphologically constructed words and can also generate 'fertile' translations. We show that fertile translations increase the overall quality of the extracted lexicon for English to French translation

Example-based machine translation of the Basque language

Basque is both a minority and a highly inflected language with free order of sentence constituents. Machine Translation of Basque is thus both a real need and a test bed for MT techniques. In this paper, we present a modular Data-Driven MT system which includes different chunkers as well as chunk aligners which can deal with the free order of sentence constituents of Basque. We conducted Basque to English translation experiments, evaluated on a large corpus (270, 000 sentence pairs). The experimental results show that our system significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches according to several common automatic evaluation metrics

Introduction to the special issue on cross-language algorithms and applications

With the increasingly global nature of our everyday interactions, the need for multilingual technologies to support efficient and efective information access and communication cannot be overemphasized. Computational modeling of language has been the focus of Natural Language Processing, a subdiscipline of Artificial Intelligence. One of the current challenges for this discipline is to design methodologies and algorithms that are cross-language in order to create multilingual technologies rapidly. The goal of this JAIR special issue on Cross-Language Algorithms and Applications (CLAA) is to present leading research in this area, with emphasis on developing unifying themes that could lead to the development of the science of multi- and cross-lingualism. In this introduction, we provide the reader with the motivation for this special issue and summarize the contributions of the papers that have been included. The selected papers cover a broad range of cross-lingual technologies including machine translation, domain and language adaptation for sentiment analysis, cross-language lexical resources, dependency parsing, information retrieval and knowledge representation. We anticipate that this special issue will serve as an invaluable resource for researchers interested in topics of cross-lingual natural language processing.Postprint (published version