Why was the English Malady 'English'?

English-to-English Statistical Machine Translation: Why and How

Machine translation, the task of generating tools to translate or to help translate text from one natural language into another by means of a computerized system, has been the subject of intense research over the past five decades. It is one of the earliest proposed uses for the computer and, to date, one of the most dramatic failures of the field. From the beginning, computer scientists promis...

A pleasant malady: The Ellen/Allan Merger in New Zealand English

This paper reports on a series of production and perception experiments designed to investigate the merger of /el/ and /æl/ in New Zealand English (NZE). 16 young NZE speakers completed a range of tasks involving nonsense and real words containing prelateral /e/ and /æ/. In production, both vowels were produced in an area of acoustic space closer to non-prelateral /æ/ than /e/, and were also no...

Why is English so easy to segment?

Cross-linguistic studies on unsupervised word segmentation have consistently shown that English is easier to segment than other languages. In this paper, we propose an explanation of this finding based on the notion of segmentation ambiguity. We show that English has a very low segmentation ambiguity compared to Japanese and that this difference correlates with the segmentation performance in a...

Animacy Encoding In English: Why And How

We report on two recent medium-scale initiatives annotating present day English corpora for animacy distinctions. We discuss the relevance of animacy for computational linguistics, specifically generation, the annotation categories used in the two studies and the interannotator reliability for one of the studies.

English Nouns English Coarse English Verbs English Adjectives