Improviging translation selection with a new translation model trained by independent monolingual corpora. Computational Linguistics and Chinese language Processing, 6(1), 1–26. GLOSSARY aligned corpus A collection of multilingual documents, in which text

Abstract We propose a novel statistical translation model to improve translation selection of collocation. In the statistical approach that has been popularly applied for translation selection, bilingual corpora are used to train the translation model. However, there exists a formidable bottleneck in acquiring large-scale bilingual corpora, in particular for language pairs involving Chinese. In this paper, we propose a new approach to training the translation model by using unrelated monolingual corpora. First, a Chinese corpus and an English corpus are parsed with dependency parsers, respectively, and two dependency triple databases are generated. Then, the similarity between a Chinese word and an English word can be estimated using the two monolingual dependency triple databases with the help of a simple Chinese-English dictionary. This cross-language word similarity is used to simulate the word translation probability. Finally, the generated translation model is used together with the language model trained with the English dependency database to realize translation of Chinese collocations into English. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, we performed various experiments with verb-object collocation translation. The experiments produced very promising results

Experimental Investigation on Damage Behavior of Polypropylene Fiber Reinforced Concrete under Compression

Abstract This paper presents an experimental investigation on the stress–strain behavior and the damage mechanism of polypropylene fiber reinforced concrete (PFRC) under monotonic and cyclic compression. Fifty-four specimens for different fiber volume fractions and aspect ratios were tested. Acoustic emission (AE) technique was used to monitor the damage progression. The damage mechanism of concrete was analyzed based on the AE parametric analysis. The results show that the incorporation of polypropylene fiber (PF) has a positive effect on the monotonic and cyclic behaviors of concrete, especially for the post-cracking branch. The toughness and ultimate strain are enhanced and the performance degradation in terms of elastic stiffness and strength is alleviated by the addition of PF. However, PF has little influences on the plastic strain, and the damage process of concrete is mainly driven by the envelope strain. The effect of fiber volume fraction on the cyclic behavior of concrete shows more pronounced than that of aspect ratio. In addition, it is found from AE results that the damage, closely related to AE events, has a quick evolution just after the peak stress, with the AE hits having a concentrated release. The total amount of AE hits increases with increasing fiber volume fraction due to fiber pullout and sliding, while the concrete with fiber aspect ratio of 280 reaches the largest amount. Meanwhile, as substantiated by AE, the failure of PFRC shows an obvious shear mode, with shear cracks dominating the damage progression. Finally, a damage elasto-plastic model is developed to predict the monotonic and cyclic responses of PFRC and the prediction yields a fairly close estimation with experimental results