Termhood-based Comparability Metrics of Comparable Corpus in Special Domain

Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) and machine translation (MT) resources, such as dictionaries and parallel corpora, are scarce and hard to come by for special domains. Besides, these resources are just limited to a few languages, such as English, French, and Spanish and so on. So, obtaining comparable corpora automatically for such domains could be an answer to this problem effectively. Comparable corpora, that the subcorpora are not translations of each other, can be easily obtained from web. Therefore, building and using comparable corpora is often a more feasible option in multilingual information processing. Comparability metrics is one of key issues in the field of building and using comparable corpus. Currently, there is no widely accepted definition or metrics method of corpus comparability. In fact, Different definitions or metrics methods of comparability might be given to suit various tasks about natural language processing. A new comparability, namely, termhood-based metrics, oriented to the task of bilingual terminology extraction, is proposed in this paper. In this method, words are ranked by termhood not frequency, and then the cosine similarities, calculated based on the ranking lists of word termhood, is used as comparability. Experiments results show that termhood-based metrics performs better than traditional frequency-based metrics

Bilingual contexts from comparable corpora to mine for translations of collocations

Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, CICLing2016Due to the limited availability of parallel data in many languages, we propose a methodology that benefits from comparable corpora to find translation equivalents for collocations (as a specific type of difficult-to-translate multi-word expressions). Finding translations is known to be more difficult for collocations than for words. We propose a method based on bilingual context extraction and build a word (distributional) representation model drawing on these bilingual contexts (bilingual English-Spanish contexts in our case). We show that the bilingual context construction is effective for the task of translation equivalent learning and that our method outperforms a simplified distributional similarity baseline in finding translation equivalents

Computational Phraseology light: automatic translation of multiword expressions without translation resources

This paper describes the first phase of a project whose ultimate goal is the implementation of a practical tool to support the work of language learners and translators by automatically identifying multiword expressions (MWEs) and retrieving their translations for any pair of languages. The task of translating multiword expressions is viewed as a two-stage process. The first stage is the extraction of MWEs in each of the languages; the second stage is a matching procedure for the extracted MWEs in each language which proposes the translation equivalents. This project pursues the development of a knowledge-poor approach for any pair of languages which does not depend on translation resources such as dictionaries, translation memories or parallel corpora which can be time consuming to develop or difficult to acquire, being expensive or proprietary. In line with this philosophy, the methodology developed does not rely on any dictionaries or parallel corpora, nor does it use any (bilingual) grammars. The only information comes from comparable corpora, inexpensively compiled. The first proofof- concept stage of this project covers English and Spanish and focuses on a particular subclass of MWEs: verb-noun expressions (collocations) such as take advantage, make sense, prestar atención and tener derecho. The choice of genre was determined by the fact that newswire is a widespread genre and available in different languages. An additional motivation was the fact that the methodology was developed as language independent with the objective of applying it to and testing it for different languages. The ACCURAT toolkit (Pinnis et al. 2012; Skadina et al. 2012; Su and Babych 2012a) was employed to compile automatically the comparable corpora and documents only above a specific threshold were considered for inclusion. More specifically, only pairs of English and Spanish documents with comparability score (cosine similarity) higher 0.45 were extracted. Statistical association measures were employed to quantify the strength of the relationship between two words and to propose that a combination of a verb and a noun above a specific threshold would be a (candidate for) multiword expression. This study focused on and compared four popular and established measures along with frequency: Log-likelihood ratio, T-Score, Log Dice and Salience. This project follows the distributional similarity premise which stipulates that translation equivalents share common words in their contexts and this applies also to multiword expressions. The Vector Space Model is traditionally used to represent words with their co-occurrences and to measure similarity. The vector representation for any word is constructed from the statistics of the occurrences of that word with other specific/context words in a corpus of texts. In this study, the word2vec method (Mikolov et al. 2013) was employed. Mikolov et al.’s method utilises patterns of word co-occurrences within a small window to predict similarities among words. Evaluation results are reported for both extracting MWEs and their automatic translation. A finding of the evaluation worth mentioning is that the size of the comparable corpora is more important for the performance of automatic translation of MWEs than the similarity between them as long as the comparable corpora used are of minimal similarity

A Fine-grained Multilingual Analysis Based on the Appraisal Theory: Application to Arabic and English Videos

International audienceThe objective of this paper is to compare the opinions of two videos in two different languages. To do so, a fine-grained approach inspired from the appraisal theory is used to analyze the content of the videos that concern the same topic. In general, the methods devoted to sentiment analysis concern the study of the polarity of a text or an utterance. The appraisal approach goes further than the basic polarity sentiments and consider more detailed sentiments by covering additional attributes of opinions such as: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement. In order to achieve such a comparison, in AMIS (Chist-Era project), we collected a corpus of 1503 Arabic and 1874 English videos. These videos need to be aligned in order to compare their contents, that is why we propose several methods to make them comparable. Then the best one is selected to align them and to constitute the data-set necessary for the fine-grained sentiment analysis

Assessing language dominance in bilingual acquisition: a case for mean length utterance differentials

The notion of language dominance is often defined in terms of proficiency. We distinguish dominance, as a property of the bilingual mind and a concept of language knowledge, from proficiency, as a concept of language use. We discuss ways in which language dominance may be assessed, with a focus on measures of mean length of utterance (MLU). Comparison of MLU in the child's 2 languages is subject to questions of comparability across languages. Using the Hong Kong Bilingual corpus of Cantonese–English children's development, we show how MLU differentials can be a viable measure of dominance that captures asymmetrical development where there is an imbalance between the child's 2 languages. The directionality of syntactic transfer goes primarily from the language with higher MLU value to the language with lower MLU value, and the MLU differential matches the pervasiveness of transfer effects, as in the case of null objects discussed here: The greater the differential, the more frequent the occurrence of null objects. Cantonese-dominant children with a larger MLU differential use null objects more frequently than those with a lower MLU differential. In our case studies, MLU differentials also matched with language preferences and silent periods but did not predict the directionality of code-mixing.published_or_final_versio