As interaction between speakers of different languages continues to increase, the everpresent problem of language barriers must be overcome. For the same reason, automatic language translation (Machine Translation) has become an attractive area of research and development. Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) has been used for translation between many language pairs, the results of which have ...

In this paper, we propose a selective combination approach of pivot and direct statistical machine translation (SMT) models to improve translation quality. We work with Persian-Arabic SMT as a case study. We show positive results (from 0.4 to 3.1 BLEU on different direct training corpus sizes) in addition to a large reduction of pivot translation model size.

Syllable contact pairs cross-linguistically tend to have a falling sonority slope, a constraint which is called the Syllable Contact Law (SCL). In this study, the phonotactics of syllable contacts in 4202 CVC.CVC words of Persian lexicon is investigated. The consonants of Persian were divided into five sonority categories and the frequency of all possible sonority slopes is computed both in lex...

 The present study is an attempt to investigate the use of vague expressions by intermediate EFL learners. More specifically, the current study focuses on the structures and functions of one of the most common categories of vague language, i.e. general extenders. The data include a 22-hour corpus of English-as-a-foreign-language conversations. A comparison is also made between this corpus and a...