Shallow-transfer rule-based machine translation for Czech to Polish

This article describes the developmentof an Open Source shallow-transfer machine translation system from Czech to Polish in theApertium platform. It gives details ofthe methods and resources used in contructingthe system. Although the resulting system has quite a high error rate, it is still competitive with other systems.

Automatic acquisition of Named Entities for Rule-Based Machine Translation

This paper proposes to enrich RBMTdictionaries with Named Entities(NEs) automatically acquired fromWikipedia. The method is appliedto the Apertium English-Spanishsystem and its performance comparedto that of Apertium with and withouthandtagged NEs. The system withautomatic NEs outperforms the onewithout NEs, while results vary whencompared to a system with handtaggedNEs (results are comparable forSpanish to English but slightly worstfor English to Spanish). Apart fromthat, adding automatic NEs contributesto decreasing the amount of unknownterms by more than 10%.

Taking on new challenges in multi-word unit processing for Machine Translation

This paper discusses the qualitativecomparative evaluation performed on theresults of two machine translation systemswith different approaches to the processing ofmulti-word units. It proposes a solution forovercoming the difficulties multi-word unitspresent to machine translation by adopting amethodology that combines the lexicongrammar approach with OpenLogos ontologyand semantico-syntactic rules. The paper alsodiscusses the importance of a qualitativeevaluation metrics to correctly evaluate theperformance of machine translation engineswith regards to multi-word units.

A Widely Used Machine Translation Service and its Migration to a Free/Open-Source Solution : the Case of Softcatalà

Softcatalà is a non-profit associationcreated more than 10 years ago to fightthe marginalisation of the Catalan languagein information and communicationtechnologies. It has led the localisationof many applications and thecreation of a website which allows itsusers to translate texts between Spanishand Catalan using an external closed-sourcetranslation engine. Recently,the closed-source translation back-endhas been replaced by a free/open-sourcesolution completely managed by Softcatalà: the Apertium machine translationplatform and the ScaleMT web serviceframework. Thanks to the opennessof the new solution, it is possibleto take advantage of the huge amount ofusers of the Softcatalà translation serviceto improve it, using a series ofmethods presented in this paper. In addition,a study of the translations requestedby the users has been carriedout, and it shows that the translationback-end change has not affected theusage patterns.

Rule-based machine translation between Bulgarian and Macedonian

This paper describes the development of a two-way shallow-transfer rule-based machine translation system between Bulgarian and Macedonian. It gives an account of the resources and the methods used for constructing the system, including the development of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, syntactic transfer rules and constraint grammars. An evaluation of thesystem's performance was carried out and compared to another commercially available MT system for the two languages. Some future work was suggested.

Transboard : Aplicación web colaborativa para traducción de aplicaciones web

El proyecto consiste en una aplicación web que permita a diferentes grupos de usuarios colaborar en la internacionalización y traducción de aplicaciones de una manera coordinada y eficiente. En su desarrollo se han evaluado diferentes aproximaciones de cara a obtener las mejores soluciones para este problema.

Apertium Advanced Web Interface : A first step towards interactivity and language tools convergence

This documents sums up a projectaimed at building a new web interfaceto the Apertium machine translationplatform, including pre-editing andpost-editing environments. It containsa description of the accomplished workon this project, as well as an overviewof possible evolutions.

Toward Synchronous Extensible Dependency Grammar

Extensible Dependency Grammar (XDG; Debusmann, 2007) is a flexible, modular dependency grammarframework in which sentence analyses consist of multigraphs and processing takes the form of constraint satisfaction. This paper shows how XDGlends itself to grammar-driven machine translation and introduces the machinery necessary for synchronous XDG. Since the approach relies on a shared semantics, it resembles interlingua MT.It differs in that there are no separateanalysis and generation phases. Rather, translation consists of the simultaneousanalysis and generation of a single source-target sentence.

Maca - a configurable tool to integrate Polish morphological data

There are a number of morphological analysers for Polish. Most of these, however, are non-free resources. What is more, different analysers employ different tagsets and tokenisation strategies. This situation calls for a simpleand universal framework to join different sources of morphological information, including the existing resources as well as user-provided dictionaries. We present such a configurable framework that allows to write simple configuration files that define tokenisation strategies and the behaviour of morphologicalanalysers, including simple tagset conversion.

Bootstrapping a statistical speech translator from a rule-based one

We describe a series of experiments in which we start with English to French and English to Japanese versions of an Open Source rule-based speech translation system for a medical domain, and bootstrap correspondign statistical systems. Comparative evaluation reveals that the rule-based systems are still significantly better than the statistical ones, despite the fact that considerable effort has been invested in tuning both the recognition and translation components; also, a hybrid system only marginally improved recall at the cost of a los in precision. The result suggests that rule-based architectures may still be preferable to statistical ones for safety-critical speech translation tasks.

An Italian to Catalan RBMT system reusing data from existing language pairs

This paper presents an Italian to CatalanRBMT system automatically built bycombining the linguistic data of theexisting pairs Spanish-Catalan andSpanish-Italian. A lightweight manualpostprocessing is carried out in order tofix inconsistencies in the automaticallyderived dictionaries and to add very frequentwords that are missing accordingto a corpus analysis. The system isevaluated on the KDE4 corpus and outperformsGoogle Translate by approximatelyten absolute points in terms ofboth TER and GTM.

Translating and analysing songs: three songs in the context of communist Romania

Songs were the means used by the Romanian Communist Party to ‘educate’ Romanians. Through them, Romanians were told what they had to appreciate, how grateful they were supposed to be to the regime, how great President Ceausescu was and how they had to work harder and harder so that they could be even better Communists. This paper comprises the translation of three songs composed, performed and broadcast in Communist Romania and their analysis from the point of view of communication. In translating the song, I have chosen to translate closest to the original possible meaning and meanwhile to respect to the best of my ability Low’s ‘pentathlon principle’: singability, rhyme, rhythm, naturalness and fidelity to the sense of the source text

An empirical study of machine learning techniques applied to image watermarking

A study of how the machine learning technique, known as gentleboost, could improve different digital watermarking methods such as LSB, DWT, DCT2 and Histogram shifting.

Towards a user-friendly webservice architecture for statistical machine translation in the PANACEA project

This paper presents a webservice architecture for Statistical Machine Translation aimed at non-technical users. A workfloweditor allows a user to combine different webservices using a graphical user interface. In the current state of this project,the webservices have been implemented for a range of sentential and sub-sententialaligners. The advantage of a common interface and a common data format allows the user to build workflows exchanging different aligners.

A polynomial algorithm for special case of the one-machine scheduling problem with time-lags

The standard one-machine scheduling problem consists in schedulinga set of jobs in one machine which can handle only one job at atime, minimizing the maximum lateness. Each job is available forprocessing at its release date, requires a known processing timeand after finishing the processing, it is delivery after a certaintime. There also can exists precedence constraints between pairsof jobs, requiring that the first jobs must be completed beforethe second job can start. An extension of this problem consistsin assigning a time interval between the processing of the jobsassociated with the precedence constrains, known by finish-starttime-lags. In presence of this constraints, the problem is NP-hardeven if preemption is allowed. In this work, we consider a specialcase of the one-machine preemption scheduling problem with time-lags, where the time-lags have a chain form, and propose apolynomial algorithm to solve it. The algorithm consist in apolynomial number of calls of the preemption version of the LongestTail Heuristic. One of the applicability of the method is to obtainlower bounds for NP-hard one-machine and job-shop schedulingproblems. We present some computational results of thisapplication, followed by some conclusions.