Learning Translation Rules from Bilingual English - Filipino Corpus

PACLIC 19 / Taipei, taiwan / December 1-3, 200

Learning Translation Rules for a Bidirectional English-Filipino Machine Translator

PACLIC 20 / Wuhan, China / 1-3 November, 200

An Automated Thematic Role Labeler and Generalizer for Filipino Verb Arguments

PACLIC 23 / City University of Hong Kong / 3-5 December 200

COMMUNICATIVE ASPECTS OF MULTILINGUAL CODE SWITCHING IN COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION

The quintessential role of language has been punctiliously studied relative to intercultural communication, cultural heritage, social development, education, identity construction and many more domains. One forum wherein language is investigated is the Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) which provides a fertile ground for linguistic and sociolinguistic analyses. The present study aims at investigating the preferred codes used in code switching (CS), functions of CS, and the motives of users for employing CS in CMC. The present study was based on the investigation of 200 status updates and 100 wall posts of 50 Facebook accounts of students who are enrolled in a leading state university in Mindanao and professionals who graduated from the same university. Besides English and Filipino, these Facebook users speak various regional languages such as Chavacano, Cebuano, and Tausug. Their posts were analyzed employing eclectic approaches in analyzing inter-sentential and intra-sentential code switching. The findings reveal that the preferred code in their online communication is Taglish. It implies that Taglish is an equalizer, non-privileging, non-discriminating, and more unifying. The primary reason for CS is because of real lexical need. Besides the given categories, the study determined four other reasons for CS, namely: to express ideas spontaneously, to retain native terminology, to express disappointment, and to promote relationship. The findings vouch for the viability of regional languages to co-exist with English and other languages in the gamut of human interactions in the internet

Metalinguistic Awareness of Multilingual First Graders: An Exploratory Study

This study, which utilized a modified metalinguistic awareness test adopted from Dita’s (2009), probed on young children’s metalinguistic awareness in identifying syntactic errors; determining sounds and the use of phonological segments; and explaining a word on their own by describing its appearance or its functions in English, Filipino, and Cebuano. This study attempted to elucidate young children’s readiness to take on more difficult linguistic tasks in the succeeding academic levels. Since the children’s level of metalinguistic awareness is average, this study recommends that schools are encouraged to provide strategies and lessons that would enhance learners’ metalinguistic awareness, most especially in terms of language arbitrariness in English and Filipino; and since there is significant difference in all three languages in all tests, parents and teachers should ensure that the pupils achieve full proficiency in all three languages by providing rich experiences equally in these languages

Code-switching in Filipino newspapers: expansion of language, culture and identity

2012 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.This research investigates code-switching beginning with a global, sociolingustic perspective of borrowed words and narrows down to a detailed examination of insertional code-switching in formal settings. The data were obtained by selecting and subsequently scanning English news articles from Philippines' printed newspapers which built evidence for which types of terms are substituted for English. The corpus was examined for identifiable patterns of code-switched lexical items from Tagalog and Cebuano/Visaya, two of the largest spoken languages in the Philippines. A significant presence of code-switching extends the phenomena from a bilingual, substitutional tool into a creative linguistic process that reinforces a growing global language identity out of multiple language speakers in a world of shifting nationalities and boundaries

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

Source side pre-ordering using recurrent neural networks for English-Myanmar machine translation

Word reordering has remained one of the challenging problems for machine translation when translating between language pairs with different word orders e.g. English and Myanmar. Without reordering between these languages, a source sentence may be translated directly with similar word order and translation can not be meaningful. Myanmar is a subject-objectverb (SOV) language and an effective reordering is essential for translation. In this paper, we applied a pre-ordering approach using recurrent neural networks to pre-order words of the source Myanmar sentence into target English’s word order. This neural pre-ordering model is automatically derived from parallel word-aligned data with syntactic and lexical features based on dependency parse trees of the source sentences. This can generate arbitrary permutations that may be non-local on the sentence and can be combined into English-Myanmar machine translation. We exploited the model to reorder English sentences into Myanmar-like word order as a preprocessing stage for machine translation, obtaining improvements quality comparable to baseline rule-based pre-ordering approach on asian language treebank (ALT) corpus

Decolonial Potential in a Multilingual FYC

Scholars in rhetoric and composition have questioned to what extent the field can be decolonial because of the gatekeeping role that writing plays in the university. This article examines the decolonial potential of implementing multilingual practices in first-year composition (fyc), enacting what Walter Mignolo calls “epistemic disobedience” by complicating the primacy of English as the language of knowledge-building. I describe a Spanish-English “bilingual” fyc course offered at a private university with a Jesuit Catholic heritage. The course is characterized by a translanguaging approach in which Spanish is presented as a valid language for academic writing. The students’ writing highlights the enduring influence of colonialism in the form of monolingual ideology within the linguistically diverse geographical context of Silicon Valley, where the potential of decolonial practices are tempered by the economic power of the tech industry and its hiring practices, which have resulted in a low number of employed women and minorities in comparison to both national employment levels and diversity within the region