Which user interaction for cross-language information retrieval? Design issues and reflections

A novel and complex form of information access is cross-language information retrieval: searching for texts written in foreign languages based on native language queries. Although the underlying technology for achieving such a search is relatively well understood, the appropriate interface design is not. The authors present three user evaluations undertaken during the iterative design of Clarity, a cross-language retrieval system for low-density languages, and shows how the user-interaction design evolved depending on the results of usability tests. The first test was instrumental to identify weaknesses in both functionalities and interface; the second was run to determine if query translation should be shown or not; the final was a global assessment and focused on user satisfaction criteria. Lessons were learned at every stage of the process leading to a much more informed view of what a cross-language retrieval system should offer to users

Japanese/English Cross-Language Information Retrieval: Exploration of Query Translation and Transliteration

Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are in different languages, has of late become one of the major topics within the information retrieval community. This paper proposes a Japanese/English CLIR system, where we combine a query translation and retrieval modules. We currently target the retrieval of technical documents, and therefore the performance of our system is highly dependent on the quality of the translation of technical terms. However, the technical term translation is still problematic in that technical terms are often compound words, and thus new terms are progressively created by combining existing base words. In addition, Japanese often represents loanwords based on its special phonogram. Consequently, existing dictionaries find it difficult to achieve sufficient coverage. To counter the first problem, we produce a Japanese/English dictionary for base words, and translate compound words on a word-by-word basis. We also use a probabilistic method to resolve translation ambiguity. For the second problem, we use a transliteration method, which corresponds words unlisted in the base word dictionary to their phonetic equivalents in the target language. We evaluate our system using a test collection for CLIR, and show that both the compound word translation and transliteration methods improve the system performance

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

Multilingual Lexicon Extraction under Resource-Poor Language Pairs

In general, bilingual and multilingual lexicons are important resources in many natural language processing fields such as information retrieval and machine translation. Such lexicons are usually extracted from bilingual (e.g., parallel or comparable) corpora with external seed dictionaries. However, few such corpora and bilingual seed dictionaries are publicly available for many language pairs such as Korean–French. It is important that such resources for these language pairs be publicly available or easily accessible when a monolingual resource is considered. This thesis presents efficient approaches for extracting bilingual single-/multi-word lexicons for resource-poor language pairs such as Korean–French and Korean–Spanish. The goal of this thesis is to present several efficient methods of extracting translated single-/multi-words from bilingual corpora based on a statistical method. Three approaches for single words and one approach for multi-words are proposed. The first approach is the pivot context-based approach (PCA). The PCA uses a pivot language to connect source and target languages. It builds context vectors from two parallel corpora sharing one pivot language and calculates their similarity scores to choose the best translation equivalents. The approach can reduce the effort required when using a seed dictionary for translation by using parallel corpora rather than comparable corpora. The second approach is the extended pivot context-based approach (EPCA). This approach gathers similar context vectors for each source word to augment its context. The approach assumes that similar vectors can enrich contexts. For example, young and youth can augment the context of baby. In the investigation described here, such similar vectors were collected by similarity measures such as cosine similarity. The third approach for single words uses a competitive neural network algorithm (i.e., self-organizing mapsSOM). The SOM-based approach (SA) uses synonym vectors rather than context vectors to train two different SOMs (i.e., source and target SOMs) in different ways. A source SOM is trained in an unsupervised way, while a target SOM is trained in a supervised way. The fourth approach is the constituent-based approach (CTA), which deals with multi-word expressions (MWEs). This approach reinforces the PCA for multi-words (PCAM). It extracts bilingual MWEs taking all constituents of the source MWEs into consideration. The PCAM 2 identifies MWE candidates by pointwise mutual information first and then adds them to input data as single units in order to use the PCA directly. The experimental results show that the proposed approaches generally perform well for resource-poor language pairs, particularly Korean and French–Spanish. The PCA and SA have demonstrated good performance for such language pairs. The EPCA would not have shown a stronger performance than expected. The CTA performs well even when word contexts are insufficient. Overall, the experimental results show that the CTA significantly outperforms the PCAM. In the future, homonyms (i.e., homographs such as lead or tear) should be considered. In particular, the domains of bilingual corpora should be identified. In addition, more parts of speech such as verbs, adjectives, or adverbs could be tested. In this thesis, only nouns are discussed for simplicity. Finally, thorough error analysis should also be conducted.Abstract List of Abbreviations List of Tables List of Figures Acknowledgement Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Multilingual Lexicon Extraction 1.2 Motivations and Goals 1.3 Organization Chapter 2 Background and Literature Review 2.1 Extraction of Bilingual Translations of Single-words 2.1.1 Context-based approach 2.1.2 Extended approach 2.1.3 Pivot-based approach 2.2 Extractiong of Bilingual Translations of Multi-Word Expressions 2.2.1 MWE identification 2.2.2 MWE alignment 2.3 Self-Organizing Maps 2.4 Evaluation Measures Chapter 3 Pivot Context-Based Approach 3.1 Concept of Pivot-Based Approach 3.2 Experiments 3.2.1 Resources 3.2.2 Results 3.3 Summary Chapter 4 Extended Pivot Context-Based Approach 4.1 Concept of Extended Pivot Context-Based Approach 4.2 Experiments 4.2.1 Resources 4.2.2 Results 4.3 Summary Chapter 5 SOM-Based Approach 5.1 Concept of SOM-Based Approach 5.2 Experiments 5.2.1 Resources 5.2.2 Results 5.3 Summary Chapter 6 Constituent-Based Approach 6.1 Concept of Constituent-Based Approach 6.2 Experiments 6.2.1 Resources 6.2.2 Results 6.3 Summary Chapter 7 Conclusions and Future Work 7.1 Conclusions 7.2 Future Work Reference

Building basic vocabulary across 40 languages

The paper explores the options for building bilingual dictionaries by automated methods. We define the notion ‘basic vocabulary ’ and investigate how well the conceptual units that make up this language-independent vocabulary are covered by language-specific bindings in 40 languages

New Values in Art: Japanese and Japoniste Ceramics, 1866-1904

This dissertation explores a constellation of interrelated, and under-investigated, French and Japanese ceramics spanning the period between 1866, the year that marked the production of the first ceramic set that came to be known as japoniste, and 1904, the year of the St. Louis World’s Fair, where contemporaneous Japanese and French ceramics shared a common vocabulary. The historical data I collected in France and Japan and its analysis, through qualitative and quantitative sociological tools, led me to conclude that Japonisme represented a tightly knit social network in which ceramics were used as currency to broker unprecedented links within and between the central binaries of the nineteenth-century French art world: academic/ avant-garde, art/ craft, fine art/ decorative art, painting/ other mediums, intrinsic/ instrumental, representational/ self-referential, and tradition/ innovation. Until now, most attention to Japonisme has been concentrated on the ukiyo-e woodblock prints used instrumentally by the Modernist practitioners of what Duranty called the “new painting.” My study turns our attention to a medium in which cultural power relationships were more evenly balanced, and in which, therefore, we can trace how two cultures can interact productively. Japanese ceramics taught French collectors and artists how to begin to discern between Chinese and Japanese traditions and to “read” the cultural references embedded in Japanese decoration. Also, French collectors’ antiquarian interest in Japanese ceramics was readily matched by French potters who reformed their practice and altered hierarchies of medium by drawing on the European arabesque tradition, the Rococo Revival, and the Japanese aesthetic of playfulness. In return, Meiji- and Taisho-period Japanese potters and porcelain manufacturers emulated European japoniste ceramic vocabulary in what constituted a renegotiation of the balance between tradition, on the one hand, and imported technologies and new global markets, on the other. Their ceramics reflected several rounds of exchange between the Japanese and French art worlds. These objects demonstrated just how complexly two social networks from two previously distinct cultures had been influencing each other in a medium they both valued, ceramics. I call this phenomenon “uroboric” Japonisme because it most fully illustrates the circular nature of transcultural exchanges and the central role that such exchanges play in the renewal of aesthetic and sociocultural identities