Managing complexity in a distributed digital library

As the capabilities of distributed digital libraries increase, managing organizational and software complexity becomes a key issue. How can collections and indexes be updated without impacting queries currently in progress? How can the system handle several user-interface clients for the same collections? Computer science professors and lectors from the University of Waikato have developed a software structure that successfully manages this complexity in the New Zealand Digital Library. This digital library has been a success in managing organizational and software complexity. The researchers' primary goal has been to minimize the effort required to keep the system operational and yet continue to expand its offerings

Lexical coverage evaluation of large-scale multilingual semantic lexicons for twelve languages

The last two decades have seen the development of various semantic lexical resources such as WordNet (Miller, 1995) and the USAS semantic lexicon (Rayson et al., 2004), which have played an important role in the areas of natural language processing and corpus-based studies. Recently, increasing efforts have been devoted to extending the semantic frameworks of existing lexical knowledge resources to cover more languages, such as EuroWordNet and Global WordNet. In this paper, we report on the construction of large-scale multilingual semantic lexicons for twelve languages, which employ the unified Lancaster semantic taxonomy and provide a multilingual lexical knowledge base for the automatic UCREL semantic annotation system (USAS). Our work contributes towards the goal of constructing larger-scale and higher-quality multilingual semantic lexical resources and developing corpus annotation tools based on them. Lexical coverage is an important factor concerning the quality of the lexicons and the performance of the corpus annotation tools, and in this experiment we focus on evaluating the lexical coverage achieved by the multilingual lexicons and semantic annotation tools based on them. Our evaluation shows that some semantic lexicons such as those for Finnish and Italian have achieved lexical coverage of over 90% while others need further expansion

SZKOLENIE TŁUMACZY W TUNEZJI: WYZWANIA I MOŻLIWOŚCI OBECNE NA RYNKU USŁUG TŁUMACZENIOWYCH

The heavy Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Tunisia which is in progress now will have its impact on the translation industry in the forthcoming years. But while most Tunisian translation teachers and professional translators agree on the urgent need to bridge the gap between the translation classroom and the real world of the translation market (the Academic and Professional Gap (APG)), academic traditions are inhibiting a clear critical focus on this APG. Teachers are still educating students in general skills and academic institutions do not try to frame appropriate strategies to train them to work in specific jobs. Therefore, such traditions are less likely to allow students to be able to succeed when they join this market, and to expect sound career development as they upgrade their skills. Translatorship is after all granted by the market and not by any academic institution. In the face of these challenges, this paper will draw attention to some of the available opportunities which are deemed of paramount importance in any attempt to achieve more professionally-oriented translation training. These opportunities will lead to some concrete and practical suggestions on how to aptly use corpora in the translation classroom, on the one hand, and how to profit from the translation experience inside the United Nations system, on the other.Duża liczba inwestycji zagranicznych w Tunezji w znaczący sposób wpłynie w najbliższych latach na rynek usług tłumaczeniowych w tym kraju. Jednakże, mimo że większość nauczycieli przekładu oraz zawodowych tłumaczy widzi palącą potrzebę dostosowania zajęć z tłumaczenia do potrzeb rynku, tradycyjne metody akademickie w zakresie nauczania przekładu w wyraźny sposób hamują proces reform w tym zakresie. Brak specjalizacji daje adeptom przekładu niewielkie szanse na odniesienie sukcesu w pracy zawodowej. Niniejszy artykuł stawia sobie za cel zwrócenie uwagi na możliwości zmiany metod szkolenia tłumaczy by adepci przekładu mieli możliwość zdobycia kompetencji, które pozwolą im na profesjonalne wykonywanie zawodu. Sugestie autora dotyczą między innymi wykorzystania korpusów w nauczaniu przekładu oraz korzystania z doświadczeń tłumaczeniowych zdobytych w ramach ONZ

Analysis of errors in the automatic translation of questions for translingual QA systems

Purpose – This study aims to focus on the evaluation of systems for the automatic translation of questions destined to translingual question-answer (QA) systems. The efficacy of online translators when performing as tools in QA systems is analysed using a collection of documents in the Spanish language. Design/methodology/approach – Automatic translation is evaluated in terms of the functionality of actual translations produced by three online translators (Google Translator, Promt Translator, and Worldlingo) by means of objective and subjective evaluation measures, and the typology of errors produced was identified. For this purpose, a comparative study of the quality of the translation of factual questions of the CLEF collection of queries was carried out, from German and French to Spanish. Findings – It was observed that the rates of error for the three systems evaluated here are greater in the translations pertaining to the language pair German-Spanish. Promt was identified as the most reliable translator of the three (on average) for the two linguistic combinations evaluated. However, for the Spanish-German pair, a good assessment of the Google online translator was obtained as well. Most errors (46.38 percent) tended to be of a lexical nature, followed by those due to a poor translation of the interrogative particle of the query (31.16 percent). Originality/value – The evaluation methodology applied focuses above all on the finality of the translation. That is, does the resulting question serve as effective input into a translingual QA system? Thus, instead of searching for “perfection”, the functionality of the question and its capacity to lead one to an adequate response are appraised. The results obtained contribute to the development of improved translingual QA systems

Syntactic Computation as Labelled Deduction: WH a case study

This paper addresses the question "Why do WH phenomena occur with the particular cluster of properties observed across languages -- long-distance dependencies, WH-in situ, partial movement constructions, reconstruction, crossover etc." These phenomena have been analysed by invoking a number of discrete principles and categories, but have so far resisted a unified treatment. The explanation proposed is set within a model of natural language understanding in context, where the task of understanding is taken to be the incremental building of a structure over which the semantic content is defined. The formal model is a composite of a labelled type-deduction system, a modal tree logic, and a set of rules for describing the process of interpreting the string as a set of transition states. A dynamic concept of syntax results, in which in addition to an output structure associated with each string (analogous to the level of LF), there is in addition an explicit meta-level description of the process whereby this incremental process takes place. This paper argues that WH-related phenomena can be unified by adopting this dynamic perspective. The main focus of the paper is on WH-initial structures, WH in situ structures, partial movement phenomena, and crossover phenomena. In each case, an analysis is proposed which emerges from the general characterisatioan of WH structures without construction-specific stipulation.Articl