Building Online Corpora of Philippine Languages

PACLIC 23 / City University of Hong Kong / 3-5 December 200

Sociotechnical structures, materialist semiotics, and online language learning

Based on a study of the digital literacy practices of immigrant Filipino students in Vancouver, this paper focuses on how learners with unequal access to resources engage with different tools to locate information and find opportunities for language learning online. Data was collected through interviews and observations of participants as they used YouTube, Google Search, and Google Translate to decode unfamiliar words and find resources for learning. Framed through a materialist semiotic lens, this study examined how the students negotiated their resources on these platforms to achieve different intentions. Findings show that the way learners navigate these spaces can vary based on the devices they use (laptop vs. mobile phone), the user interface (browser vs. app), and the orientation they choose (landscape vs. portrait). The material dimensions of the screen determine the arrangement of semiotic forms, and varying configurations of devices, interfaces, and orientations shape the information made available to the learner and the digital literacy practices of scrolling, clicking, and shifting tabs. Recognizing how the online environment of a platform can shift across these layers of mediation, this paper conceptualizes the linguistic and semiotic forms that constitute design as sociotechnical structures which provide various learning affordances and constraints

Overview of the 2005 cross-language image retrieval track (ImageCLEF)

The purpose of this paper is to outline efforts from the 2005 CLEF crosslanguage image retrieval campaign (ImageCLEF). The aim of this CLEF track is to explore the use of both text and content-based retrieval methods for cross-language image retrieval. Four tasks were offered in the ImageCLEF track: a ad-hoc retrieval from an historic photographic collection, ad-hoc retrieval from a medical collection, an automatic image annotation task, and a user-centered (interactive) evaluation task that is explained in the iCLEF summary. 24 research groups from a variety of backgrounds and nationalities (14 countries) participated in ImageCLEF. In this paper we describe the ImageCLEF tasks, submissions from participating groups and summarise the main fndings

How Good Is NLP? A Sober Look at NLP Tasks through the Lens of Social Impact

Recent years have seen many breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP), transitioning it from a mostly theoretical field to one with many real-world applications. Noting the rising number of applications of other machine learning and AI techniques with pervasive societal impact, we anticipate the rising importance of developing NLP technologies for social good. Inspired by theories in moral philosophy and global priorities research, we aim to promote a guideline for social good in the context of NLP. We lay the foundations via the moral philosophy definition of social good, propose a framework to evaluate the direct and indirect real-world impact of NLP tasks, and adopt the methodology of global priorities research to identify priority causes for NLP research. Finally, we use our theoretical framework to provide some practical guidelines for future NLP research for social good. Our data and code are available at http://github.com/zhijing-jin/nlp4sg_acl2021. In addition, we curate a list of papers and resources on NLP for social good at https://github.com/zhijing-jin/NLP4SocialGood_Papers.Comment: Findings of ACL 2021; also accepted at the NLP for Positive Impact workshop@ACL 202

Auto-Translation Instant Messenger using XMPP/Jabber Protocol

Effective communication is a vital component in decision making process. However, the language barrier established from the differences in culture and origin can interrupt the process of coming to an understanding. Various translation methods have been used to break this barrier. The traditional ways of using human translator or the usage of lingua franca imposed some problem and limitations. Auto-Translation Instant Messenger is an 1M program that aimed to provide instant translation to users when they communicate with people of different speaking language. It is developed under the XMPP protocol that provides standards and flexibilities at the same time. In the process of completing this project, Modified Waterfall methodology was chosen as guidance in the development of the working program. Important project activities and milestones are explained. As part of analysis process, a set of questionnaire have been distributed and its result will act as guidance in designing and developing the program. This project is aimed to learn in deep about XMPP, machine translation and instant messagin

Evaluation of the Statistical Machine Translation Service for Croatian-English

Much thought has been given in an endeavour to formalize the translation process. As a result, various approaches to MT (machine translation) were taken. With the exception of statistical translation, all approaches require cooperation between language and computer science experts. Most of the models use various hybrid approaches. Statistical translation approach is completely language independent if we disregard the fact that it requires huge parallel corpus that needs to be split into sentences and words. This paper compares and discusses state-of-the-art statistical machine translation (SMT) models and evaluation methods. Results of statistically-based Google Translate tool for Croatian-English translations are presented and multilevel analysis is given. Three different types of texts are manually evaluated and results are analysed by the χ2-test

Newsletter : Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University No.80

Editorial Foreword … Takamichi Serizawa and Kisho Tsuchiya [3]Message from the Director: Reflections on FY2022 … Fumiharu Mieno [4]Pioneering New Fields with Informatics Knowledge and Methods: The Trajectory of Research, Development, and Practice --Reflecting on a life in research An Interview with Professor Shoichiro Hara to Commemorate his Retirement … Shoichiro Hara and Hiroki Baba [6]Beyond Nationalism? Revisiting the Youth Movements of the 1990s in East Timor and Indonesia … Takahiro Kamisuna and Kisho Tsuchiya [20]CSEAS Special Seminar “Knowledge Hegemonies and Autonomous Knowledge” with Syed Farid Alatas (National University of Singapore) … Takamichi Serizawa [25]Voyage to Autonomous Knowledge, with Farid Alatas … Syed Farid Alatas, Takeo Suzuki, and Zenta Nishio [28]Seeing Southeast Asia through Chinese-Language Newspapers … Gen Shibayama [35]Publications [37]MAHS [39]Visitor's Voice [42

Auto-Translation Instant Messenger using XMPP/Jabber Protocol

Effective communication is a vital component in decision making process. However, the language barrier established from the differences in culture and origin can interrupt the process of coming to an understanding. Various translation methods have been used to break this barrier. The traditional ways of using human translator or the usage of lingua franca imposed some problem and limitations. Auto-Translation Instant Messenger is an 1M program that aimed to provide instant translation to users when they communicate with people of different speaking language. It is developed under the XMPP protocol that provides standards and flexibilities at the same time. In the process of completing this project, Modified Waterfall methodology was chosen as guidance in the development of the working program. Important project activities and milestones are explained. As part of analysis process, a set of questionnaire have been distributed and its result will act as guidance in designing and developing the program. This project is aimed to learn in deep about XMPP, machine translation and instant messagin

Translation, interpreting, language, and foreignness in crisis communication policy: 21 years of white papers in Japan

Japan, a country of some 126 million people, is exposed to many hazards— including earthquakes, tsunamis, tropical cyclones, and floods— and regularly experiences large- scale crisis events. Japan also possesses resources and experience that allow it to cope well with many of the crises and disasters that can arise in its hazardscape. The aims of this chapter were to investigate the extent to which translation and interpreting of foreign languages have been present in this coping capacity in recent history using a computerised corpus analysis of an influential policy instrument: Japan’s annual White Paper on Disaster Management. The chapter continues in the section on “Research context” with a review of literature on crisis translation and interpreting policy and a discussion of Japan’s main policy problems, instruments, and actors. The third section, “Research methodology”, explains how a computerised, monolingual, lexical analysis of a diachronic corpus of policy texts written and analysed in Japanese was conducted. The fourth section follows with a discussion of what the use of Japanese equivalents related to “translation”, “interpreting”, “language”, and “foreignness” in the corpus suggests about policy- making developments in Japan in the last two decades. The chapter closes with conclusions that include a test of findings against the 2021 White Paper, limitations, and suggestions for future work