Machine translation of user-generated content

The world of social media has undergone huge evolution during the last few years. With the spread of social media and online forums, individual users actively participate in the generation of online content in different languages from all over the world. Sharing of online content has become much easier than before with the advent of popular websites such as Twitter, Facebook etc. Such content is referred to as ‘User-Generated Content’ (UGC). Some examples of UGC are user reviews, customer feedback, tweets etc. In general, UGC is informal and noisy in terms of linguistic norms. Such noise does not create significant problems for human to understand the content, but it can pose challenges for several natural language processing applications such as parsing, sentiment analysis, machine translation (MT), etc. An additional challenge for MT is sparseness of bilingual (translated) parallel UGC corpora. In this research, we explore the general issues in MT of UGC and set some research goals from our findings. One of our main goals is to exploit comparable corpora in order to extract parallel or semantically similar sentences. To accomplish this task, we design a document alignment system to extract semantically similar bilingual document pairs using the bilingual comparable corpora. We then apply strategies to extract parallel or semantically similar sentences from comparable corpora by transforming the document alignment system into a sentence alignment system. We seek to improve the quality of parallel data extraction for UGC translation and assemble the extracted data with the existing human translated resources. Another objective of this research is to demonstrate the usefulness of MT-based sentiment analysis. However, when using openly available systems such as Google Translate, the translation process may alter the sentiment in the target language. To cope with this phenomenon, we instead build fine-grained sentiment translation models that focus on sentiment preservation in the target language during translation

Formality Style Transfer Within and Across Languages with Limited Supervision

While much natural language processing work focuses on analyzing language content, language style also conveys important information about the situational context and purpose of communication. When editing an article, professional editors take into account the target audience to select appropriate word choice and grammar. Similarly, professional translators translate documents for a specific audience and often ask what is the expected tone of the content when taking a translation job. Computational models of natural language should consider both their meaning and style. Controlling style is an emerging research area in text rewriting and is under-investigated in machine translation. In this dissertation, we present a new perspective which closely connects formality transfer and machine translation: we aim to control style in language generation with a focus on rewriting English or translating French to English with a desired formality. These are challenging tasks because annotated examples of style transfer are only available in limited quantities. We first address this problem by inducing a lexical formality model based on word embeddings and a small number of representative formal and informal words. This enables us to assign sentential formality scores and rerank translation hypotheses whose formality scores are closer to user-provided formality level. To capture broader formality changes, we then turn to neural sequence to sequence models. Joint modeling of formality transfer and machine translation enables formality control in machine translation without dedicated training examples. Along the way, we also improve low-resource neural machine translation

Reimagining Nabokov

In Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, eleven teachers of Vladimir Nabokov describe how and why they teach this notoriously difficult, even problematic, writer to the next generations of students. Contributors offer fresh perspectives and embrace emergent pedagogical methods, detailing how developments in technology, translation and archival studies, and new interpretative models have helped them to address urgent questions of power, authority, and identity. Practical and insightful, this volume features exciting methods through which to reimagine the literature classroom as one of shared agency between students, instructors, and the authors they read together. “It is both timely and refreshing to have an influx of teacher-scholars who engage Nabokov from a variety of perspectives… this volume does justice to the breadth of Nabokov’s literary achievements, and it does so with both pedagogical creativity and scholarly integrity” • Dana Dragunoiu, Carleton Universit

The thought behind the utterance : Aspects of Communication in Song

This thesis investigates how a classically trained recital singer may set about achieving mastery in his or her field. It draws upon the ideas and opinions of writers on singing, pedagogy, composition, aesthetics, rhetoric, acting and psychology. It also draws upon the experience of the author as a singer whose career has spanned thirty years as performer and recording artist, teacher of voice and repertoire, and who has written on the history and interpretation of English song. The main thrust of the argument is that the complete performer must engage the mind in every aspect of the craft, whether it be in the creation of vocal sound, in the preparation of musical and textual material, or in the visualisation and realisation of the character of a song’s protagonist: prescriptive instruction alone is not sufficient to achieve this aim. Chapter one, The voice, maintains that intellect, musicianship, imagination and visualisation go hand-in-hand with vocal technique and natural talent to create the consummate performer. Chapter two, Visual presentation, explores the visual element of performance, and how feeling may be convincingly displayed through appropriate use of the body. Chapter three, The mode o f address, looks at the delivery of text and how this may affect the performer’s focus of attention. Chapter four, The poem’s provenance, discusses how the significance of a text may be affected by the context in which it is found. Chapter five, Meaning, highlights some problems encountered in translating or interpreting texts. Chapter six, Interpretation o f a non-English text, looks in some detail at a particular song in order to explore how the nuanced meanings of poetic language can be preserved during the process of translation. Chapter seven, The thought behind the utterance, contains a discussion of the moment the protagonist finds a new thought before expressing i