Inducing a cline from corpora of political manifestos

Techniques from corpus linguistics are applied to the analysis of a number of European right-wing parties in an effort to extend methods for ranking parties on a left-right spectrum within and across countries and languages. Focus is placed on parties not in government, and analysis is derived from corpora derived from election manifestos published by those parties. The techniques applied are objective in that they apply statistical measures with confidence tests to objectively quantifiable linguistic features of the documents. Valid applicability of the techniques is demonstrated. The methods are then used to estimate pairwise similarity of a number of European political parties, including cross-national comparisons

Post-editing machine translated text in a commercial setting: Observation and statistical analysis

Machine translation systems, when they are used in a commercial context for publishing purposes, are usually used in combination with human post-editing. Thus understanding human post-editing behaviour is crucial in order to maximise the benefit of machine translation systems. Though there have been a number of studies carried out on human post-editing to date, there is a lack of large-scale studies on post-editing in industrial contexts which focus on the activity in real-life settings. This study observes professional Japanese post-editors’ work and examines the effect of the amount of editing made during post-editing, source text characteristics, and post-editing behaviour, on the amount of post-editing effort. A mixed method approach was employed to both quantitatively and qualitatively analyse the data and gain detailed insights into the post-editing activity from various view points. The results indicate that a number of factors, such as sentence structure, document component types, use of product specific terms, and post-editing patterns and behaviour, have effect on the amount of post-editing effort in an intertwined manner. The findings will contribute to a better utilisation of machine translation systems in the industry as well as the development of the skills and strategies of post-editors