We introduce a simple and effective crosslingual approach to identifying collocations. This approach is based on the observation that true collocations, which cannot be translated word for word, will exhibit very different association scores before and after literal translation. Our experiments in Japanese demonstrate that our cross-lingual association measure can successfully exploit the combi...

We present an unsupervised word segmentation model for machine translation. The model uses existing monolingual segmentation techniques and models the joint distribution over source sentence segmentations and alignments to the target sentence. During inference, the monolingual segmentation model and the bilingual word alignment model are coupled so that the alignments to the target sentence gui...

The present interactive multimedia courseware is predominantely monolingual. On the other hand, economy, society and education are global and multilingual. Therefore, it seems reasonable to expect that multilingualism should bring benefits to the education process. This paper defines the aspects of multilingual interactive multimedia courseware composition and advocates for the support of multi...

This article describes the participation of the joint Elhuyar-IXA group in the ResPubliQA exercise at QA&CLEF 2010. In particular, we participated in the English–English monolingual task and in the Basque– English cross-lingual one. Our focus was threefold: (1) to check to what extent information retrieval (IR) can achieve good results in passage retrieval without question analysis and answer v...

This paper investigates the need for applying English prosody when synthesising English portions of mixed English/German texts using a German-based polyglot text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system. The polyglot system is based on a monolingual German TTS system, which uses a phone mapping from English to German to synthesise English texts. Two systems with varying degrees of assimilation to Engli...

Attention is essential for all learning. Increasing research suggests that bilingual children have advanced (relative to monolingual children) development of attentional control. The present study includes 80 bilingual and 80 monolingual child participants from a variety of language and age groups (2.5 to 5 year-olds) to systematically investigate how early learning/exposure to more than one la...

Automatic plagiarism detection considering a reference corpus compares a suspicious text to a set of documents in order to relate the plagiarised fragments to their potential source. The suspicious and source documents can be written wether in the same language (monolingual) or in different languages (crosslingual). In the context of the Ph. D., our work has been focused on both monolingual and...

Statistical phrase-based translation learns translation rules from bilingual corpora, and has traditionally only used monolingual evidence to construct features that rescore existing translation candidates. In this work, we present a semi-supervised graph-based approach for generating new translation rules that leverages bilingual and monolingual data. The proposed technique first constructs ph...

This paper describes the procedure adopted by the three coordinators of the CLEF 2003 question answering track (ITC-irst, UNED and ILLC) to create the question set for the monolingual tasks. Despite the little resources available, the three groups collaborated and managed to formulate and verify a large pool of original questions posed in three different languages: Dutch, Italian and Spanish. A...

This paper presents a paraphrase acquisition method that uncovers and exploits generalities underlying paraphrases: paraphrase patterns are first induced and then used to collect novel instances. Unlike existing methods, ours uses both bilingual parallel and monolingual corpora. While the former are regarded as a source of high-quality seed paraphrases, the latter are searched for paraphrases t...