TransBooster: boosting the performance of wide-coverage machine translation systems

We propose the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel and modular approach to boost the translation performance of existing, wide-coverage, freely available machine translation systems based on reliable and fast automatic decomposition of the translation input and corresponding composition of translation output. We provide details of our method, and experimental results compared to the MT systems SYSTRAN and Logomedia. While many avenues for further experimentation remain, to date we fall just behind the baseline systems on the full 800-sentence testset, but in certain cases our method causes the translation quality obtained via the MT systems to improve

Improving online machine translation systems

In (Mellebeek et al., 2005), we proposed the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel and modular approach to boost the translation performance of existing, wide-coverage, freely available machine translation systems, based on reliable and fast automatic decomposition of the translation input and corresponding composition of translation output. Despite showing some initial promise, our method did not improve on the baseline Logomedia1 and Systran2 MT systems. In this paper, we improve on the algorithm presented in (Mellebeek et al., 2005), and on the same test data, show increased scores for a range of automatic evaluation metrics. Our algorithm now outperforms Logomedia, obtains similar results to SDL3 and falls tantalisingly short of the performance achieved by Systran

Dublin City University at CLEF 2004: experiments in monolingual, bilingual and multilingual retrieval

The Dublin City University group participated in the monolingual, bilingual and multilingual retrieval tasks this year. The main focus of our investigation this year was extending our retrieval system to document languages other than English, and completing the multilingual task comprising four languages: English, French, Russian and Finnish. Results from our French monolingual experiments indicate that working in French is more effective for retrieval than adopting document and topic translation to English. However, comparison of our multilingual retrieval results using different topic and document translation reveals that this result does not extend to retrieved list merging for the multilingual task in a simple predictable way

Dublin City University at CLEF 2004: experiments with the ImageCLEF St Andrew's collection

For the CLEF 2004 ImageCLEF St Andrew's Collection task the Dublin City University group carried out three sets of experiments: standard cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) runs using topic translation via machine translation (MT), combination of this run with image matching results from the VIPER system, and a novel document rescoring approach based on automatic MT evaluation metrics. Our standard MT-based CLIR works well on this task. Encouragingly combination with image matching lists is also observed to produce small positive changes in the retrieval output. However, rescoring using the MT evaluation metrics in their current form significantly reduced retrieval effectiveness

Negociações de significados sobre aspectos do raciocínio proporcional e identidade profissional da cop - paem

Nesse artigo apresentamos resultados parciais de uma pesquisa em desenvolvimento no contexto de uma comunidade de prática, formada por pesquisadores e professores de matemática da educação básica, que busca evidenciar aprendizagens e elementos desse contexto que colaboram para o desenvolvimento da identidade profissional do professor. Nossas considerações resultam da análise deum episódio, parte de uma ação desenvolvida pelos membros da comunidade, relacionado ao empreendimento estudo do Raciocínio Proporcional, em que um dos participantes propõe aos demais um problema com potencial para mobilizar o raciocínio relativo, analisa as estratégias de resolução dos demais, aponta e justifica evidências dessa mobilização quando ocorrem. A análise das transcrições dos áudios gravados nos encontros semanais dos membros da comunidade e dos registros escritos dos participantes evidenciou negociações de significado a respeito de conhecimentos profissionais do professor, da visão de si e da profissão de professor; e aspectos de agência e vulnerabilidade do participante que propõe a tarefa, ao se colocar em uma posição mais central na comunidade. Essas evidências indicam aprendizagens dos participantes que nos permitem inferir que ações dessa natureza no contexto de formação docente podem colaborar para o desenvolvimento da identidade profissional do professor

Properties of an alkali-thermo stable xylanase from Geobacillus thermodenitrificans A333 and applicability in xylooligosaccharides generation

An extracellular thermo-alkali-stable and cellulase-free xylanase from Geobacillus thermodenitrificans A333 was purified to homogeneity by ion exchange and size exclusion chromatography. Its molecular mass was 44 kDa as estimated in native and denaturing conditions by gel filtration and SDS-PAGE analysis, respectively. The xylanase (GtXyn) exhibited maximum activity at 70 °C and pH 7.5. It was stable over broad ranges of temperature and pH retaining 88 % of activity at 60 °C and up to 97 % in the pH range 7.5–10.0 after 24 h. Moreover, the enzyme was active up to 3.0 M sodium chloride concentration, exhibiting at that value 70 % residual activity after 1 h. The presence of other metal ions did not affect the activity with the sole exceptions of K+ that showed a stimulating effect, and Fe2+, Co2+ and Hg2+, which inhibited the enzyme. The xylanase was activated by non-ionic surfactants and was stable in organic solvents remaining fully active over 24 h of incubation in 40 % ethanol at 25 °C. Furthermore, the enzyme was resistant to most of the neutral and alkaline proteases tested. The enzyme was active only on xylan, showing no marked preference towards xylans from different origins. The hydrolysis of beechwood xylan and agriculture-based biomass materials yielded xylooligosaccharides with a polymerization degree ranging from 2 to 6 units and xylobiose and xylotriose as main products. These properties indicate G. thermodenitrificans A333 xylanase as a promising candidate for several biotechnological applications, such as xylooligosaccharides preparation

TransBooster: Boosting the Performance of Wide-coverage Machine Translation Systems

Abstract. We propose the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel and modular approach to boost the translation performance of existing, wide-coverage, freely available machine translation systems based on reliable and fast automatic decomposition of the translation input and corresponding composition of translation output. We provide details of our method, and experimental results compared to the MT systems SYSTRAN and Logomedia. While many avenues for further experimentation remain, to date we fall just behind the baseline systems on the full 800-sentence testset, but in certain cases our method causes the translation quality obtained via the MT systems to improve. 1

d-matrix based fault modeling for cryogenic loading systems

The study is motivated by NASA plans to develop technology for an autonomous cryogenic loading operation including online fault diagnostics as a part of Integrated Health Management system. For years, the diagnostic modeling effort is performed in many paradigms. None of these paradigms independently can provide a complete set of efficiency metrics: better diagnostics, lower run-time, etc. D-matrix, a causal 0-1 relationship between faults and tests, is proposed as a single representation between different model-based diagnostic methods for comparison and communication. This framework is suitable to create a common platform for communication via D-matrix for systems engineering process. The knowledge transfer between modeling techniques is done via D-matrix. In addition, D-matrix provides a common paradigm to compare the embedded knowledge and performance of heterogeneous diagnostic systems. D-matrix is generated from physics models to be used with faster run-time performance D-matrix based diagnostic algorithms. Additionally, we will also investigate if the derived D-matrix and thereby the physics model is sufficient and accurate for efficient diagnostics via iDME tool