Divergence analysis and processing for Mandarin-English parallel text exploitation

Previous work shows that the process of parallel text exploitation to extract mappings between language pairs raises the capability of language translation. However, while this process can be fully automated, one thorny problem called “divergence” causes indisposed mapping extraction. Therefore, this paper discuss the issues of parallel text exploitation, in general, with special emphasis on divergence analysis and processing. In the experiments on a Mandarin-English travel conversation corpus of 11,885 sentence pairs, the perplexity with the alignments in IBM translation model is reduced averagely from 13.65 to 4.18

Speaker segmentation and clustering

This survey focuses on two challenging speech processing topics, namely: speaker segmentation and speaker clustering. Speaker segmentation aims at finding speaker change points in an audio stream, whereas speaker clustering aims at grouping speech segments based on speaker characteristics. Model-based, metric-based, and hybrid speaker segmentation algorithms are reviewed. Concerning speaker clustering, deterministic and probabilistic algorithms are examined. A comparative assessment of the reviewed algorithms is undertaken, the algorithm advantages and disadvantages are indicated, insight to the algorithms is offered, and deductions as well as recommendations are given. Rich transcription and movie analysis are candidate applications that benefit from combined speaker segmentation and clustering. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Cascade or Direct Speech Translation? A Case Study

Speech translation has been traditionally tackled under a cascade approach, chaining speech recognition and machine translation components to translate from an audio source in a given language into text or speech in a target language. Leveraging on deep learning approaches to natural language processing, recent studies have explored the potential of direct end-to-end neural modelling to perform the speech translation task. Though several benefits may come from end-to-end modelling, such as a reduction in latency and error propagation, the comparative merits of each approach still deserve detailed evaluations and analyses. In this work, we compared state-of-the-art cascade and direct approaches on the under-resourced Basque–Spanish language pair, which features challenging phenomena such as marked differences in morphology and word order. This case study thus complements other studies in the field, which mostly revolve around the English language. We describe and analysed in detail the mintzai-ST corpus, prepared from the sessions of the Basque Parliament, and evaluated the strengths and limitations of cascade and direct speech translation models trained on this corpus, with variants exploiting additional data as well. Our results indicated that, despite significant progress with end-to-end models, which may outperform alternatives in some cases in terms of automated metrics, a cascade approach proved optimal overall in our experiments and manual evaluations. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Typological parameters of genericity

Different languages employ different morphosyntactic devices for expressing genericity. And, of course, they also make use of different morphosyntactic and semantic or pragmatic cues which may contribute to the interpretation of a sentence as generic rather than episodic. [...] We will advance the strong hypo thesis that it is a fundamental property of lexical elements in natural language that they are neutral with respect to different modes of reference or non-reference. That is, we reject the idea that a certain use of a lexical element, e.g. a use which allows reference to particular spatio-temporally bounded objects in the world, should be linguistically prior to all other possible uses, e.g. to generic and non-specific uses. From this it follows that we do not consider generic uses as derived from non-generic uses as it is occasionally assumed in the literature. Rather, we regard these two possibilities of use as equivalent alternative uses of lexical elements. The typological differences to be noted therefore concern the formal and semantic relationship of generic and non-generic uses to each other; they do not pertain to the question of whether lexical elements are predetermined for one of these two uses. Even supposing we found a language where generic uses are always zero-marked and identical to lexical sterns, we would still not assume that lexical elements in this language primarily have a generic use from which the non-generic uses are derived. (Incidentally, none of the languages examined, not even Vietnamese, meets this criterion.

Methods in Contemporary Linguistics

The present volume is a broad overview of methods and methodologies in linguistics, illustrated with examples from concrete research. It collects insights gained from a broad range of linguistic sub-disciplines, ranging from core disciplines to topics in cross-linguistic and language-internal diversity or to contributions towards language, space and society. Given its critical and innovative nature, the volume is a valuable source for students and researchers of a broad range of linguistic interests