Memory is essential to many cognitive tasks including language. Apart from empirical studies of memory effects on language acquisition and use, there lack sufficient evolutionary explorations on whether a high level of memory capacity is prerequisite for language and whether language origin could influence memory capacity. In line with evolutionary theories that natural selection refined langua...

This article presents a method of training maximum-entropy models to perform lexical selection in a rule-based machine translation system. The training method described is unsupervised; that is, it does not require any annotated corpus. The method uses source-language monolingual corpora, the machine translation (MT) system in which the models are integrated, and a statistical target-language m...

Explaining the extravagant complexity of the human language and our competence to acquire it has long posed challenges for natural selection theory. To answer his critics, Darwin turned to sexual selection to account for the extreme development of language. Many contemporary evolutionary theorists have invoked incredibly lucky mutation or some variant of the assimilation of acquired behaviors t...

This paper studies feature selection in phonotactic language recognition. The phonotactic feature is presented by n-gram statistics derived from one or more phone recognizers in the form of high dimensional feature vectors. Two feature selection strategies are proposed to select the n-gram statistics for reducing the dimension of feature vectors, so that higher order n-gram features can be adop...

Statistical machine translation (SMT) models require bilingual corpora for training, and these corpora are often multilingual with parallel text in multiple languages simultaneously. We introduce an active learning task of adding a new language to an existing multilingual set of parallel text and constructing high quality MT systems, from each language in the collection into this new target lan...

This article provides an overview of natural phonological processes in the dialect of Sistani Persian spoken in Iranian Sistan, and reviews theoretical implications of these processes. A representative selection of processes in the language is examined in reference to conditioning by surrounding segments and conditioning in reference to syllable structure. While assimilation and dissimilation a...

In this paper, we propose a lexical selection method with three steps: sense disambiguation of source words, sense-to-word mapping, and selection of the most appropriate target language lexical item. The knowledge for each step is extracted from a machine readable dictionary and a target language monolingual corpus. By splitting the process of lexical selection into three steps and extracting t...

In translation, choosing appropriate equivalent is essential to convey the right message from source-text to target-text, and one of the issues that may have a determinative role in appropriate equivalent choice is the semantic prosody (SP) behavior of words and the relation existing between the SP of a word and semantic senses (i.e. negativity, positivity or neutrality) of its collocations in ...

This lecture discusses the role of language and information theory concepts for data compression and solving the inverse problem. The concept of Algorithmic Information Content (AIC) is introduced and shown to be crucial to achieving optimal data compression and optimized Bayesian priors for image reconstruction. The dependence of the AIC on the selection of language then suggests how e±cient c...