This work describes an experimental evaluation of the significance of phrasal verb treatment for obtaining better quality statistical machine translation (SMT) results. Phrasal verbs are multiword expressions used frequently in English, independent of the domain and degree of formality of language. They are challenging for natural language processing due to their idiosyncratic semantic and synt...

In spite of the highly beneficial applications of corpus linguistics in language pedagogy, it has not found its way into mainstream EFL. The major reasons seem to be the teachers’ lack of training and the unavailability of resources, especially computers in language classes. Phrasal verbs have been shown to be a problematic area of learning English as a foreign language due to their semantic op...

We introduce a new type of transduction grammar that allows for learning of probabilistic phrasal bilexica, leading to a significant improvement in spoken language translation accuracy. The current state-of-the-art in statistical machine translation relies on a complicated and crude pipeline to learn probabilistic phrasal bilexica—the very core of any speech translation system. In this paper, w...

This paper reports on the effects of an interactive software tool on the learning of Chinese tones by English-L1 learners of Chinese. The software enables students to listen to model utterances by native speakers of Chinese and to record their own renditions of those utterances. Simultaneously the F0 contours of both the model utterances and the student utterances are displayed on the computer ...

Anomic aphasia is a disturbance affecting lexical retrieval. Nonetheless, persons with this disorder may also experience difficulties in the construction of coherent narratives. Whether this symptom is a sign of a macrolinguistic difficulty per se or reflects the lexical disorder is still an open debate. In order to analyze the effect of the lexical impairment on macrolinguistic processing, we ...