Computer science, linguists and languages

[Excerto] Prólogo: Existe uma espécie de Guerra Santa há algum tempo entre investigadores da área das ciências da computação (a que vou chamar abusivamente de informáticos) e investigadores da área das ciências da língua (a que vou chamar abusivamente de linguistas) porque os primeiros se têm aventurado em tarefas que habitualmente eram realizadas pelos segundos. Estas incursões levam a que tarefas que habitualmente demoram meses a realizar de forma manual sejam automatizadas e realizadas rapidamente, com a ajuda de um programa computacional. Tipicamente, quando estes trabalhos são apresentados em conferências habitualmente frequentadas por linguistas, são alvo de grandes críticas pela falta de correção do resultado obtido. O que pretendo apresentar neste documento são as razões que me parecem levar a este comportamento, e discutir o que é possível alcançar se informáticos e linguistas conseguirem perceber os pontos de vista e objectivos de cada um deles. [...

As humanidades e as ciências: disjunções e confluências

The present volume offers a selection of the essays presented at the XV Colóquio de Outono organized by the research unit Centro de Estudos Humanísticos (Universidade do Minho) in November 2013, under the global topic Humanities and Sciences: Disjunctions and Confluences. It has been the main objective of CEHUM, throughout the various Autumn Colloquia organized since 1998, to listen carefully to the “noise of the world” and attempt a global interpretation of the signs of the times issuing from the world around us, as vibrant echoes of many social and cultural pressing issues. This volume gathers the majority of the texts presented in the XV Colóquio de Outono, which the authors generously submitted for publication, and which will certainly testify of the important debate around the vast topic proposed for this year’s analysis and discussion. We hope that this new volume may give evidence of our concern, as a Research Centre within the Humanities which operates in a transdisciplinary structure, of the crucial role played by the Humanities in today’s world and the benefits of engaging in this challenging multidisciplinary dialogue. Throughout the three days of this XV Colóquio de Outono we had the privilege to listen to and debate the propositions of a vast number of national and international specialists in the manifold fields of inquiry here represented, engaging keynote speakers, project advisors, members of the different research teams and external researchers attached to the various research projects currently running in CEHUM in the fields of lit- erature, linguistics, philosophy, ethics, visual arts, cultural studies, music and performance. Our objective in this Colloquium was that each specific field of studies here represented never performed per se, but rather substantiated at a crossroads of disciplines, across borders, gaining form within the dialogue with researchers operating in a wide variety of fields, from Computer Science to Mathematics, Medicine and Psychology, Bioarts, Ecology and Ethics. For we believe that the Humanities is a plural territory which only achieves its maximum potential when engaging in a solid and permanent dialogue with other fields of research. Hence, it was not the disjunction between Humanities and Sciences we aimed to highlight throughout this Colloquium, but rather the confluence of research methods, queries, critical reflection and problematization pertaining both to Humanities and Sciences, despite the necessary expertise that identifies each field and the specificity of its target objects of research. For these lively and thought-provoking three days of the conference we wish to thank each and every one of the colleagues present, our distinct guests, as well as the research members of CEHUM, who so enthusiastically joined in the debate on the proposed topics of analysis. Special thanks to the Board of Directors and the research team leaders of CEHUM for the precious help provided towards the organization and the setting up of this international event. Last but not least, we wish to thank the Instituto de Letras e Ciências Humanas, as well as the research assistants and staff of CEHUM for all the precious logistic support. Finally, our gratitude to our main sponsor, Fundação para a Ciênca e a Tecnologia (FCT), for encouraging and financially supporting this yearly event and the present publication.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, UE, COMPETE, QRE

Parameterization of the Interlingua in Machine Translation

The task of designing an interlingual machine translation system is difficult, first because the designer must have a knowledge of the principles underlying crosslinguistic distinctions for the languages under consider ation, and second because the designer must then be able to incorporate this knowledge effectively into the system. Tlds paper provides a catalog of several types of distinctions among Spanish, English, and German, and describes a parametric approach that characterizes these distinctions, both at the syntactic level and at the lexical-semantic level. The approach described here is implemented in a system called UNITRAN, a machine translation system that translates English, Spanish, and German bidirectionally