Automated Detection of Usage Errors in non-native English Writing

In an investigation of the use of a novelty detection algorithm for identifying inappropriate word combinations in a raw English corpus, we employ an unsupervised detection algorithm based on the one- class support vector machines (OC-SVMs) and extract sentences containing word sequences whose frequency of appearance is significantly low in native English writing. Combined with n-gram language models and document categorization techniques, the OC-SVM classifier assigns given sentences into two different groups; the sentences containing errors and those without errors. Accuracies are 79.30 % with bigram model, 86.63 % with trigram model, and 34.34 % with four-gram model

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

Towards Avatars with Artificial Minds: Role of Semantic Memory

he first step towards creating avatars with human-like artificial minds is to give them human-like memory structures with an access to general knowledge about the world. This type of knowledge is stored in semantic memory. Although many approaches to modeling of semantic memories have been proposed they are not very useful in real life applications because they lack knowledge comparable to the common sense that humans have, and they cannot be implemented in a computationally efficient way. The most drastic simplification of semantic memory leading to the simplest knowledge representation that is sufficient for many applications is based on the Concept Description Vectors (CDVs) that store, for each concept, an information whether a given property is applicable to this concept or not. Unfortunately even such simple information about real objects or concepts is not available. Experiments with automatic creation of concept description vectors from various sources, including ontologies, dictionaries, encyclopedias and unstructured text sources are described. Haptek-based talking head that has an access to this memory has been created as an example of a humanized interface (HIT) that can interact with web pages and exchange information in a natural way. A few examples of applications of an avatar with semantic memory are given, including the twenty questions game and automatic creation of word puzzles

Natural Language Processing at the School of Information Studies for Africa

The lack of persons trained in computational linguistic methods is a severe obstacle to making the Internet and computers accessible to people all over the world in their own languages. The paper discusses the experiences of designing and teaching an introductory course in Natural Language Processing to graduate computer science students at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, in order to initiate the education of computational linguists in the Horn of Africa region

From Word to Sense Embeddings: A Survey on Vector Representations of Meaning

Over the past years, distributed semantic representations have proved to be effective and flexible keepers of prior knowledge to be integrated into downstream applications. This survey focuses on the representation of meaning. We start from the theoretical background behind word vector space models and highlight one of their major limitations: the meaning conflation deficiency, which arises from representing a word with all its possible meanings as a single vector. Then, we explain how this deficiency can be addressed through a transition from the word level to the more fine-grained level of word senses (in its broader acceptation) as a method for modelling unambiguous lexical meaning. We present a comprehensive overview of the wide range of techniques in the two main branches of sense representation, i.e., unsupervised and knowledge-based. Finally, this survey covers the main evaluation procedures and applications for this type of representation, and provides an analysis of four of its important aspects: interpretability, sense granularity, adaptability to different domains and compositionality.Comment: 46 pages, 8 figures. Published in Journal of Artificial Intelligence Researc