Many machine translation (MT) systems that utilize the knowledge automatically acquired from bilingual corpora have been proposed in conjunction with efforts to accumulate corpora. We call this approach corpus-based machine translation in this thesis. This thesis focuses on automatic construction of the translation knowledge needed for corpus-based MT and discusses the following three tasks. 1....

Language input is crucial for language acquisition and especially for children's vocabulary size. Bilingual children receive reduced input in each of their languages, compared to monolinguals, and are reported to have smaller vocabularies, at least in one of their languages. Vocabulary acquisition in trilingual children has been largely understudied; only a few case studies have been published ...

This paper describes acquisilion of English stillace case flames from a corpus, based on a gradual knowledge acquisition approach. To acquire and unambiguously accumulate precise knowledge, the process is divided inln three steps which are assigned to the most appropriate processor: either a human or a computer. The data is prepared by human workers and the knowledge is acquired and accumulated...

Few educational systems have been developed to specifically address the needs of young children who are acquiring two languages at the same time. In this paper, we present a prototype of a CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) system for English and Japanese bilingual children aged between 6 and 8. The prototype recreates a bilingual learning environment and was tested with 4 bilingual chi...

This paper considers the problem of unsupervised semantic lexicon acquisition. We introduce a fully automatic approach which exploits parallel corpora, relies on shallow text properties, and is relatively inexpensive. Given the English FrameNet lexicon, our method exploits word alignments to generate frame candidate lists for new languages, which are subsequently pruned automatically using a sm...

This paper describes an attempt to recycle parts of the Czech-to-Russian machine translation system (MT) in the new Czech-to-English MT system. The paper describes the overall architecture of the new system and the details of the modules which have been added. A special attention is paid to the problem of named entity recognition and to the method of automatic acquisition of lexico-syntactic in...

In this paper, we present a Japanese→English machine translation system that combines rule-based and statistical translation. Our system is unique in that all of its components are freely available as open source software. We describe the development of the rule-based translation engine including transfer rule acquisition from an open bilingual dictionary. We also show how translations from bot...

We report on the prototype Slovene wordnet which currently contains about 5,000 top-level concepts. The resource is based on the Serbian wordnet which has been automatically translated with the help of a bilingual dictionary, the literals ranked according to the frequency of corpus occurrence, and results manually corrected. The paper also discusses some problems encountered along the way and p...

Bilingual teaching has experienced rapid growth in the Spanish educational panorama and numerous university programmes have emerged with aim of training future CLIL (Content Language Integrated Learning) teachers. However, there is little research assessing level linguistic competence foreign languages teachers, especially those who are studying for a bilingual degree. Although this work part b...