Statistical Augmentation of a Chinese Machine-Readable Dictionary

We describe a method of using statistically-collected Chinese character groups from a corpus to augment a Chinese dictionary. The method is particularly useful for extracting domain-specific and regional words not readily available in machine-readable dictionaries. Output was evaluated both using human evaluators and against a previously available dictionary. We also evaluated performance improvement in automatic Chinese tokenization. Results show that our method outputs legitimate words, acronymic constructions, idioms, names and titles, as well as technical compounds, many of which were lacking from the original dictionary.Comment: 17 pages, uuencoded compressed PostScrip

Automatic Construction of Cross-lingual Networks of Concepts from the Hong Kong SAR Police Department

Abstract. The tragic event of September 11 has prompted the rapid growth of attention of national security and criminal analysis. In the national security world, very large volumes of data and information are generated and gathered. Much of this data and information written in different languages and stored in different locations may be seemingly unconnected. Therefore, cross-lingual semantic interoperability is a major challenge to generate an overview of this disparate data and information so that it can be analysed, searched. The traditional information retrieval (IR) approaches normally require a document to share some keywords with the query. In reality, the users may use some keywords that are different from what used in the documents. There are then two different term spaces, one for the users, and another for the documents. The problem can be viewed as the creation of a thesaurus. The creation of such relationships would allow the system to match queries with relevant documents, even though they contain different terms. Apart from this, terrorists and criminals may communicate through letters, e-mails and faxes in languages other than English. The translation ambiguity significantly exacerbates the retrieval problem. To facilitate cross-lingual information retrieval, a corpusbased approach uses the term co-occurrence statistics in parallel or comparable corpora to construct a statistical translation model to cross the language boundary. However, collecting parallel corpora between European language and Oriental language is not an easy task due to the unique linguistics and grammar structures of oriental languages. In this paper, the text-based approach to align English/Chinese Hong Kong Police press release documents from the Web is first presented. This article then reports an algorithmic approach to generate a robust knowledge base based on statistical correlation analysis of the semantics (knowledge) embedded in the bilingual press release corpus. The research output consisted of a thesaurus-like, semantic network knowledge base, which can aid in semantics-based cross-lingual information management and retrieval

Automatic construction of English/Chinese parallel corpus.

Li Kar Wing.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-96).Abstracts in English and Chinese.ABSTRACT --- p.iACKNOWLEDGEMENTS --- p.vLIST OF TABLES --- p.viiiLIST OF FIGURES --- p.ixCHAPTERSChapter 1. --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Application of corpus-based techniques --- p.2Chapter 1.1.1 --- Machine Translation (MT) --- p.2Chapter 1.1.1.1 --- Linguistic --- p.3Chapter 1.1.1.2 --- Statistical --- p.4Chapter 1.1.1.3 --- Lexicon construction --- p.4Chapter 1.1.2 --- Cross-lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR) --- p.6Chapter 1.1.2.1 --- Controlled vocabulary --- p.6Chapter 1.1.2.2 --- Free text --- p.7Chapter 1.1.2.3 --- Application corpus-based approach in CLIR --- p.9Chapter 1.2 --- Overview of linguistic resources --- p.10Chapter 1.3 --- Written language corpora --- p.12Chapter 1.3.1 --- Types of corpora --- p.13Chapter 1.3.2 --- Limitation of comparable corpora --- p.16Chapter 1.4 --- Outline of the dissertation --- p.17Chapter 2. --- LITERATURE REVIEW --- p.19Chapter 2.1 --- Research in automatic corpus construction --- p.20Chapter 2.2 --- Research in translation alignment --- p.25Chapter 2.2.1 --- Sentence alignment --- p.27Chapter 2.2.2 --- Word alignment --- p.28Chapter 2.3 --- Research in alignment of sequences --- p.33Chapter 3. --- ALIGNMENT AT WORD LEVEL AND CHARACTER LEVEL --- p.35Chapter 3.1 --- Title alignment --- p.35Chapter 3.1.1 --- Lexical features --- p.37Chapter 3.1.2 --- Grammatical features --- p.40Chapter 3.1.3 --- The English/Chinese alignment model --- p.41Chapter 3.2 --- Alignment at word level and character level --- p.42Chapter 3.2.1 --- Alignment at word level --- p.42Chapter 3.2.2 --- Alignment at character level: Longest matching --- p.44Chapter 3.2.3 --- Longest common subsequence(LCS) --- p.46Chapter 3.2.4 --- Applying LCS in the English/Chinese alignment model --- p.48Chapter 3.3 --- Reduce overlapping ambiguity --- p.52Chapter 3.3.1 --- Edit distance --- p.52Chapter 3.3.2 --- Overlapping in the algorithm model --- p.54Chapter 4. --- ALIGNMENT AT TITLE LEVEL --- p.59Chapter 4.1 --- Review of score functions --- p.59Chapter 4.2 --- The Score function --- p.60Chapter 4.2.1 --- (C matches E) and (E matches C) --- p.60Chapter 4.2.2 --- Length similarity --- p.63Chapter 5. --- EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS --- p.69Chapter 5.1 --- Hong Kong government press release articles --- p.69Chapter 5.2 --- Hang Seng Bank economic monthly reports --- p.76Chapter 5.3 --- Hang Seng Bank press release articles --- p.78Chapter 5.4 --- Hang Seng Bank speech articles --- p.81Chapter 5.5 --- Quality of the collections and future work --- p.84Chapter 6. --- CONCLUSION --- p.87Bibliograph

Korpusno istraživanje deontičkog modaliteta u pravnojezičnom diskursu

This article contributes to the study of English deontic modal means as a key linguistic phenomenon. It responds to the need of a systematic analysis of English deontic modal auxiliaries used in international legal documents of various genres. Deontic modality is studied as a conceptual category from the semantic perspective. Deontic modals that express permission, obligation and prohibition are treated with special attention to the applicability to Legal English. The corpus includes UN documents of five legal genres: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Statute of the International Court of Justice, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism. These texts were selected to identify frequency, distribution and semantic content of modal auxiliaries which express permission, obligation and prohibition in legal discourse. The aim to reveal similarities and differences in the use of deontic modal auxiliaries in General English and Legal English has been also set.Rad je prilog istraživanju deontičkih modalnih sredstava u engleskom kao jednom od ključnih lingvističkih fenomena. Odgovor je to na potrebe sustavne analize engleskih deontičkih modalnih pomoćnih glagola koji se koriste u međunarodnim pravnim dokumentima različitih žanrova. Deontička modalnost istražuje se kao pojmovna kategorija iz semantičke perspektive. Deontički modali kojima se izražava dopuštenje, obveza i zabrana obrađuju se s osobitim obzirom na primjenjivost na pravni engleski. Korpusom su zahvaćeni dokumenti Ujedinjenih nacija iz pet pravnih žanrova: Povelja Ujedinjenih naroda, Opća deklaracija o pravima čovjeka, Statut Međunarodnoga suda pravde, Sporazum o zabrani nuklearnoga oružja i Međunarodna konvencija o suzbijanju financiranja terorizma. Ti tekstovi izabrani su za određivanje čestote, distribucije i semantičkoga sadržaja modalnih glagola kojima se izražava dopuštenje, obveza i zabrana. Također je postavljen cilj otkrivanja sličnosti i različitosti u služenju deontičkim modalnim glagolima u općem engleskom jeziku i u pravnom engleskom jeziku

Paraphrasing and Translation

Paraphrasing and translation have previously been treated as unconnected natural lan¬ guage processing tasks. Whereas translation represents the preservation of meaning when an idea is rendered in the words in a different language, paraphrasing represents the preservation of meaning when an idea is expressed using different words in the same language. We show that the two are intimately related. The major contributions of this thesis are as follows:• We define a novel technique for automatically generating paraphrases using bilingual parallel corpora, which are more commonly used as training data for statistical models of translation.• We show that paraphrases can be used to improve the quality of statistical ma¬ chine translation by addressing the problem of coverage and introducing a degree of generalization into the models.• We explore the topic of automatic evaluation of translation quality, and show that the current standard evaluation methodology cannot be guaranteed to correlate with human judgments of translation quality.Whereas previous data-driven approaches to paraphrasing were dependent upon either data sources which were uncommon such as multiple translation of the same source text, or language specific resources such as parsers, our approach is able to harness more widely parallel corpora and can be applied to any language which has a parallel corpus. The technique was evaluated by replacing phrases with their para¬ phrases, and asking judges whether the meaning of the original phrase was retained and whether the resulting sentence remained grammatical. Paraphrases extracted from a parallel corpus with manual alignments are judged to be accurate (both meaningful and grammatical) 75% of the time, retaining the meaning of the original phrase 85% of the time. Using automatic alignments, meaning can be retained at a rate of 70%.Being a language independent and probabilistic approach allows our method to be easily integrated into statistical machine translation. A paraphrase model derived from parallel corpora other than the one used to train the translation model can be used to increase the coverage of statistical machine translation by adding translations of previously unseen words and phrases. If the translation of a word was not learned, but a translation of a synonymous word has been learned, then the word is paraphrased and its paraphrase is translated. Phrases can be treated similarly. Results show that augmenting a state-of-the-art SMT system with paraphrases in this way leads to significantly improved coverage and translation quality. For a training corpus with 10,000 sentence pairs, we increase the coverage of unique test set unigrams from 48% to 90%, with more than half of the newly covered items accurately translated, as opposed to none in current approaches

Polarized Discourses of Abortion in English: A Corpus-based Study of Semantic Prosody and Discursive Salience

Amidst ongoing global debate about reproductive rights, questions have emerged about the role of language in reinforcing stigma around termination. Amongst some ‘pro-choice’ groups, the use of pro-life is discouraged, and anti-abortion is recommended. In UK official documents, termination of pregnancy is generally used, and abortion is avoided. Lack of empirical research focused on lexis means it is difficult to draw conclusions about the role language plays in this polarized debate, however. This paper, therefore, explores whether the stigma associated with abortion may reflect negative semantic prosody. Synthesizing quantitative corpus linguistic methods and qualitative discourse analysis, it presents findings that indicate that abortion has unfavourable semantic prosody in a corpus of contemporary internet English. These findings are considered in relation to discursive salience, offering a theoretical framework and operationalization of this theory. Through this lens, the paper considers whether the discursive salience of extreme anti-abortion discourses may strengthen the negative semantic prosody of abortion. It, therefore, combines a contribution to theory around semantic prosody with a caution to those using abortion whilst unaware of its possibly unfavourable semantic prosody

A corpus-based study of Chinese and English translation of international economic law: an interdisciplinary study

International Economic Law (IEL), a sub-discipline of International Law, is concerned with the regulation of international economic relations and the behaviours of States, international organisations, and firms operating in the international arena. Due to the increase in commercial intercourse, translation of International Economic Law has become an important factor in promoting cross-cultural communication. The translation of IEL is not purely a technical exercise that simply involves the linguistic translations from one language to another but rather a social and cultural act. This research sets out to examine the translation of terminology used in International Economic Law (IEL) – drawing on data from a bespoke self-built Parallel Corpus of International Economic Law (PCIEL) using a corpus-based, systematic micro-level framework – to analyse the subject matter and to discuss the feasibility of translating these legal terms at the word level, and the sentence and discourse level, with a particular focus on the impact of cultural influences. The study presents the findings from the Chinese translator’s perspective regarding International Economic Law from English/Chinese into Chinese/English with a focus on the areas of law, economics, and culture. The contribution made by a corpus-based approach applied to the interdisciplinary subject of IEL is explored. In particular, this establishes a link between linguistic and non-linguistic study in translating legal texts, especially IEL. The corpus data are organized in different semantic fields and the translation analysis covers lexical, sentential and cultural perspectives. This research demonstrates that not only linguistic factors, but, also, cultural factors make clear contributions to the translation of terminology in PCIEL