Terminology localization guidelines for the national scenario

The paper is a preprint of the paper accepted to the LREC 2014 : The 9th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference scheduled May 28, 2014 - May 30, 2014 in Reykjavik (Iceland).This paper presents a set of principles and practical guidelines for terminology work in the national scenario to ensure a harmonized approach in term localization. These linguistic principles and guidelines are elaborated by the Terminology Commission in Latvia in the domain of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). We also present a novel approach in a corpus-based selection and an evaluation of the most frequently used terms. Analysis of the terms proves that, in general, in the normative terminology work in Latvia localized terms are coined according to these guidelines. We further evaluate how terms included in the database of official terminology are adopted in the general use such as newspaper articles, blogs, forums, websites etc. Our evaluation shows that in a non-normative context the official terminology faces a strong competition from other variations of localized terms. Conclusions and recommendations from lexical analysis of localized terms are provided. We hope that presented guidelines and approach in evaluation will be useful to terminology institutions, regulative authorities and researchers in different countries that are involved in the national terminology work.The research leading to these results has received funding from the research project “Optimization methods of large scale statistical models for innovative machine translation technologies” of European Regional Development Fund, contract nr. 2013/0038/2DP/2.1.1.1.0/13/APIA/VIAA/029

Lazy Evaluation and Delimited Control

The call-by-need lambda calculus provides an equational framework for reasoning syntactically about lazy evaluation. This paper examines its operational characteristics. By a series of reasoning steps, we systematically unpack the standard-order reduction relation of the calculus and discover a novel abstract machine definition which, like the calculus, goes "under lambdas." We prove that machine evaluation is equivalent to standard-order evaluation. Unlike traditional abstract machines, delimited control plays a significant role in the machine's behavior. In particular, the machine replaces the manipulation of a heap using store-based effects with disciplined management of the evaluation stack using control-based effects. In short, state is replaced with control. To further articulate this observation, we present a simulation of call-by-need in a call-by-value language using delimited control operations

Genie: A Generator of Natural Language Semantic Parsers for Virtual Assistant Commands

To understand diverse natural language commands, virtual assistants today are trained with numerous labor-intensive, manually annotated sentences. This paper presents a methodology and the Genie toolkit that can handle new compound commands with significantly less manual effort. We advocate formalizing the capability of virtual assistants with a Virtual Assistant Programming Language (VAPL) and using a neural semantic parser to translate natural language into VAPL code. Genie needs only a small realistic set of input sentences for validating the neural model. Developers write templates to synthesize data; Genie uses crowdsourced paraphrases and data augmentation, along with the synthesized data, to train a semantic parser. We also propose design principles that make VAPL languages amenable to natural language translation. We apply these principles to revise ThingTalk, the language used by the Almond virtual assistant. We use Genie to build the first semantic parser that can support compound virtual assistants commands with unquoted free-form parameters. Genie achieves a 62% accuracy on realistic user inputs. We demonstrate Genie's generality by showing a 19% and 31% improvement over the previous state of the art on a music skill, aggregate functions, and access control.Comment: To appear in PLDI 201

From treebank resources to LFG F-structures

We present two methods for automatically annotating treebank resources with functional structures. Both methods define systematic patterns of correspondence between partial PS configurations and functional structures. These are applied to PS rules extracted from treebanks, or directly to constraint set encodings of treebank PS trees