Hybrid language processing in the Spoken Language Translator

The paper presents an overview of the Spoken Language Translator (SLT) system's hybrid language-processing architecture, focussing on the way in which rule-based and statistical methods are combined to achieve robust and efficient performance within a linguistically motivated framework. In general, we argue that rules are desirable in order to encode domain-independent linguistic constraints and achieve high-quality grammatical output, while corpus-derived statistics are needed if systems are to be efficient and robust; further, that hybrid architectures are superior from the point of view of portability to architectures which only make use of one type of information. We address the topics of ``multi-engine'' strategies for robust translation; robust bottom-up parsing using pruning and grammar specialization; rational development of linguistic rule-sets using balanced domain corpora; and efficient supervised training by interactive disambiguation. All work described is fully implemented in the current version of the SLT-2 system.Comment: 4 pages, uses icassp97.sty; to appear in ICASSP-97; see http://www.cam.sri.com for related materia

The Speech-Language Interface in the Spoken Language Translator

The Spoken Language Translator is a prototype for practically useful systems capable of translating continuous spoken language within restricted domains. The prototype system translates air travel (ATIS) queries from spoken English to spoken Swedish and to French. It is constructed, with as few modifications as possible, from existing pieces of speech and language processing software. The speech recognizer and language understander are connected by a fairly conventional pipelined N-best interface. This paper focuses on the ways in which the language processor makes intelligent use of the sentence hypotheses delivered by the recognizer. These ways include (1) producing modified hypotheses to reflect the possible presence of repairs in the uttered word sequence; (2) fast parsing with a version of the grammar automatically specialized to the more frequent constructions in the training corpus; and (3) allowing syntactic and semantic factors to interact with acoustic ones in the choice of a meaning structure for translation, so that the acoustically preferred hypothesis is not always selected even if it is within linguistic coverage.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX. Published: Proceedings of TWLT-8, December 199

Adapting the Core Language Engine to French and Spanish

We describe how substantial domain-independent language-processing systems for French and Spanish were quickly developed by manually adapting an existing English-language system, the SRI Core Language Engine. We explain the adaptation process in detail, and argue that it provides a fairly general recipe for converting a grammar-based system for English into a corresponding one for a Romance language.Comment: 9 pages, aclap.sty; to appear in NLP+IA 96; see also http://www.cam.sri.com

Estimating Performance of Pipelined Spoken Language Translation Systems

Most spoken language translation systems developed to date rely on a pipelined architecture, in which the main stages are speech recognition, linguistic analysis, transfer, generation and speech synthesis. When making projections of error rates for systems of this kind, it is natural to assume that the error rates for the individual components are independent, making the system accuracy the product of the component accuracies. The paper reports experiments carried out using the SRI-SICS-Telia Research Spoken Language Translator and a 1000-utterance sample of unseen data. The results suggest that the naive performance model leads to serious overestimates of system error rates, since there are in fact strong dependencies between the components. Predicting the system error rate on the independence assumption by simple multiplication resulted in a 16\% proportional overestimate for all utterances, and a 19\% overestimate when only utterances of length 1-10 words were considered.Comment: 10 pages, Latex source. To appear in Proc. ICSLP '9

Bridging Certification and Community Forestry through NTFPs: A Case Study from Nepal

Issue - For a variety of reasons, community forestry is not always well suited to existing forest certification schemes. Using the case of Nepal, this paper considers the extent to which promoting the trade in nontimber forest products can complement, or even provide an alternative to, forest certification for timber while promoting sustainable community forestry. The paper develops recent work on the interaction of transnational business governance (TBG) schemes to suggest how these two approaches to sustainable forest management can work together productively

Weather and climate

Atmospheric weather and climate interact with the ocean on short and long timescales, respectively. They affect the circulation, temperature and salinity of the ocean and consequently have an effect on marine ecosystems. Central England Temperature (CET) has increased by approximately 1 °C since the beginning of the 20th century, as have annual mean air temperatures over Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. The warmest year in CET since records began in 1659 was in 2006. The phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) can affect the weather and climate of the UK and varies on periods of days to years. Over the past five years, the NAO has been in a positive phase, which leads to stronger winter westerly winds. The average number of storms in October to March recorded at UK stations has increased significantly over the past 50 years. However, the magnitude of storminess had similar values at the start and end of the 20th century. There remains a tendency towards wetter winters in north and west Scotland. Two out of the five wettest UK summers since records began in 1766 occurred in 2007 and 2008. Global surface temperature (assessed using a combination of changes in air temperatures over land and sea surface temperatures) has increased by about 0.75 ± 0.2 °C since the late 19th century. All ten warmest years (globally) since records began in 1850 have occurred in the 12-year period 1997–2008. Over the 21st century: all areas of the UK are predicted to get warmer, and the warming is predicted to be greater in summer than in winter; there is predicted to be little change in the amount of precipitation that falls annually, but it is likely that more will fall in the winter, with drier summers, for much of the U.K

Poly[1,4-bis­(ammonio­meth­yl)cyclo­hexane [di-μ-iodido-diiodido­plumbate(II)]]

The title compound, {(C8H20N2)[PbI4]}n, is an inorganic–organic hybrid. The structure is composed of alternate layers of two-dimensional corner-sharing PbI6 octa­hedra ( symmetry) and 1,4-bis­(ammonio­meth­yl)cyclo­hexane cations ( symmetry) extending parallel to the bc plane. The cations inter­act with the inorganic layer via N—H⋯I hydrogen bonding in the right-angled halogen sub-type of the terminal halide hydrogen-bonding motif