An Interlingual Lexical Organisation Based on Acceptions. From the PARAX mock-up to the NADIA system.

Many projects are conducted to develop multilingual lexical databases. Some of these projects use an interlingual approach (KBMT-89, EDR, ...), where others choose a bilingual approach (Multilex, ...)

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

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

The multi-agent model of language choice: National planning and individual volition in China

Language choice is often studied as choices made by the state at the level of national language planning or as individual choice of language or variety in language use. There has been little research to directly connect these two aspects of language choice. This paper attempts to incorporate the two aspects and other related phenomena in a multi-agent model of language choice and illustrates the proposed model with some data on circumstances in China. The agents involved are: policy-makers, educators, family members, learners and other language users. After outlining the model, the discussion focuses on how choices made by policy-makers in China at the language planning level relate to choices made by individual learners or language users at the level of personal language development in China. It draws upon findings in the Language Education in China Project based on three main types of data: policy statements, survey statistics (on 415 Han Chinese learners, the majority ethnic group in China, and 60 learners from different minorities in China) as well as interviews of 35 Han Chinese learners and 17 learners from ethnic minorities. The paper presents brief accounts of the policies and some survey trends before focusing on interview data on six Han Chinese learners and three minority learners. It is argued that realization of national language planning goals depends on whether individual learners abide by the choices made by the state and whether the intermediary agents such as teachers and parents cooperate; it is also suggested that learners learn well if they choose to do so, where choice assumes active investment of learning time and energy into learning or using the target language(s).postprin

Using comparable corpora to filter bilingual dictionaries generated by transitivity

Este artigo propõe um método para a construção de novos dicionários bilíngues a partir de dicionários já existentes e da exploração de corpora comparáveis. Mais concretamente, um novo dicionário para um par de línguas é gerado em duas etapas: primeiro, cruzam-se dicionários bilíngues entre essas línguas e uma terceira intermediária e, segundo, o resultado do cruzamento, que contém um número elevado de traduções espúrias causadas pela ambiguidade das palavras da língua intermediária, filtra-se com apoio em textos de temática comparável nas duas línguas alvo. A qualidade do dicionário derivado é muito alta, próxima dos dicionários construídos manualmente. Descreveremos um caso de estudo onde criaremos um novo dicionário Inglês-Português com mais de 7.000 entradas bilíngues geradas pelo nosso métodoThis article proposes a method for building new bilingual dictionaries from existing ones and the use of comparable corpora. More precisely, a new bilingual dictionary with pairs in two target languages is built in two steps. First, a noisy dictionary is generated by transitivity by crossing two existing dictionaries containing translation pairs in one of the two target languages and an intermediary one. The result of crossing the two existing dictionaries gives rise to a noisy resource because of the ambiguity of words in the intermediary language. Second, odd translation pairs are filtered out by making use of a set of bilingual lexicons automatically extracted from comparable corpora. The quality of the filtered dictionary is very high, close to that of those dictionaries built by lexicographs. We also report a case study where a new, non noisy, English-Portuguese dictionary with more than 7,000 bilingual entries was automatically generatedS

Translation as intercultural mediation : setting the scene

This introduction to the volume examines the concept of intercultural mediation as it applies to the work of translators. To frame the discussion, it considers what it means for a translator to mediate between languages and cultures and the ways that mediation has been used in translation studies

Bilingual Lexicon Extraction Using a Modified Perceptron Algorithm

전산 언어학 분야에서 병렬 말뭉치와 이중언어 어휘는 기계번역과 교차 정보 탐색 등의 분야에서 중요한 자원으로 사용되고 있다. 예를 들어, 병렬 말뭉치는 기계번역 시스템에서 번역 확률들을 추출하는데 사용된다. 이중언어 어휘는 교차 정보 탐색에서 직접적으로 단어 대 단어 번역을 가능하게 한다. 또한 기계번역 시스템에서 번역 프로세스를 도와주는 역할을 하고 있다. 그리고 학습을 위한 병렬 말뭉치와 이중언어 어휘의 용량이 크면 클수록 기계번역 시스템의 성능이 향상된다. 그러나 이러한 이중언어 어휘를 수동으로, 즉 사람의 힘으로 구축하는 것은 많은 비용과 시간과 노동을 필요로 한다. 이러한 이유들 때문에 이중언어 어휘를 추출하는 연구가 많은 연구자들에게 각광받게 되었다. 본 논문에서는 이중언어 어휘를 추출하는 새롭고 효과적인 방법론을 제안한다. 이중언어 어휘 추출에서 가장 많이 다루어지는 벡터 공간 모델을 기반으로 하고, 신경망의 한 종류인 퍼셉트론 알고리즘을 사용하여 이중언어 어휘의 가중치를 반복해서 학습한다. 그리고 반복적으로 학습된 이중언어 어휘의 가중치와 퍼셉트론을 사용하여 최종 이중언어 어휘들을 추출한다. 그 결과, 학습되지 않은 초기의 결과에 비해서 반복 학습된 결과가 평균 3.5%의 정확도 향상을 얻을 수 있었다1. Introduction 2. Literature Review 2.1 Linguistic resources: The text corpora 2.2 A vector space model 2.3 Neural networks: The single layer Perceptron 2.4 Evaluation metrics 3. System Architecture of Bilingual Lexicon Extraction System 3.1 Required linguistic resources 3.2 System architecture 4. Building a Seed Dictionary 4.1 Methodology: Context Based Approach (CBA) 4.2 Experiments and results 4.2.1 Experimental setups 4.2.2 Experimental results 4.3 Discussions 5. Extracting Bilingual Lexicons 4.1 Methodology: Iterative Approach (IA) 4.2 Experiments and results 4.2.1 Experimental setups 4.2.2 Experimental results 4.3 Discussions 6. Conclusions and Future Work

Evaluation of an Esperanto-Based Interlingua Multilingual Survey Form Machine Translation Mechanism Incorporating a Sublanguage Translation Methodolgy

Translation costs restrict the preparation of medical survey and other questionnaires for migrant communities in Western Australia. This restriction is compounded by a lack of affordable and accurate machine translation mechanisms. This research investigated and evaluated combined strategies intended to provide an efficacious and affordable machine translator by: • using an interlingua or pivot-language that requires less resources for its construction than contemporary systems and has the additional benefit of significant error reduction; and • defining smaller lexical environments to restrict data, thereby reducing the complexity of translation rules and enhancing correct semantic transfer between natural languages. This research focussed on producing a prototype machine translation mechanism that would accept questionnaire texts as discrete questions and suggested answers from which a respondent may select. The prototype was designed to accept non-ambiguous English as the source language, translate it to a pivot-language or interlingua, Esperanto, and thence to a selected target language, French. Subsequently, a reverse path of translation from the target language back to the source language enabled validation of minimal or zero change in both syntax and semantics of the original input. Jade, an object-oriented (00) database application, hosting the relationship between the natural languages and the interlingua, was used to facilitate the accurate transfer of meaning between the natural languages. Translation, interpretation and validation of sample texts was undertaken by linguists qualified in English, French and Esperanto. Translation output from the prototype model was compared, again with assistance from linguists, with a \u27control\u27 model, the SYSTRAN On-Line Translator, a more traditional transfer translation product. Successful completion of this research constitutes a step towards an increased availability of low cost machine translation to assist in the development of reliable and efficient survey translation systems for use in specific user environments. These environments include, but arc not exclusive to, medical, hospital and Australian indigenous-contact environments