This article presents tile Structural Correspondence Speclflcatlon Environment (S('SE) being Implemented at GETA-The SCSE is designed to help linguists to develop, consult and verify the SCS Gr'alt~nar s (SCSG) which specify I lngulst ic models. It Integrates the t eclln 1 clues of' data bases, structured edltors and language interpreters. We argue that formalisms and tools of specification are...

The enigma of the Emergence of Natural Languages, coupled or not with the closely related problem of their Evolution, E&ENL Problem for short, is perceived today as one of the most important scientific problems and even, according to the provocative title of [11], as the “hardest” one: “Despite a staggering growth in our scientific knowledge about the origin of life, the universe and (almost) e...

We consider the application of Game Theory in the modeling of different strategies of politeness. In particular, we examine how differences in the linguistic form of requests and proposals map onto the structure of the game being played by interlocutors. We show how considerations of social wants [1, 2] and coordination and cooperation motivate these differences. First, we adapt the notion of o...

The Multi-language Speech (MLS) Corpus supports NIST’s Language Recognition Evaluation series by providing new conversational telephone speech and broadcast narrowband data in 20 languages/dialects. The corpus was built with the intention of testing system performance in the matter of distinguishing closely related or confusable linguistic varieties, and careful manual auditing of collected dat...

This paper introduces L2F’s (INESC-ID) question/answering system and presents its results in the QA@CLEF07 evaluation task. QA@LF bases its performance on a high-quality deep linguistic analysis of the question, which is strongly based on named entity recognition. However, if a precise analysis is not possible or if no answer is found in previous processed data, the system is also capable of re...

We investigated using the LDC English/Chinese bilingual wordlists for English-Chinese cross language retrieval. It is shown that the Chinese-to-English wordlist can be considered as both a phrase and word dictionary, and is preferable to the English-to-Chinese version in terms of phrase translation and word translation selection. Additional techniques such as frequency-based term selection, tra...

The Layered Domain Class system (LDC) is an experimental natural language processor being developed at Duke University which reached the prototype stage in May of 1983. Its primary goals are (I) to provide English-language retrieval capabilities for structured but unnormaUzed data files created by the user, (2) to allow very complex semantics, in terms of the information directly available from...

Over-dependence of African countries on the West has been reflected in various socioeconomic dimensions. Such dependence has also been reflected in the telecommunications industry of Africa’s LDCs in a bid to solve its low teledensity (number of main telephone lines per one hundred inhabitants) problems. African LDCs are greatly behind other regions of the world in utilizing information and tel...

This paper deals with the semantics of the Evidential marker in Northern Ostyak. As far as I know, the semantics of grammaticalized Evidentials has not been studied in detail for the (eastern) Uralic languages, although in the modal system of some of them the Evidential category plays an important role. I will analyze the different meanings of the Ostyak Evidentials, and suggest that the appare...

The paper featuresMAVE, a knowledge-based system for answer validation through deep linguistic processing and logical inference. A relaxation loop is used to determine a robust indicator of logical entailment. The system not only validates answers directly, but also gathers evidence by proving the original question and comparing results with the answer candidate. This method boosts recall by up...