This paper improves an existing bilingual paraphrase extraction technique using monolingual distributional similarity to rerank candidate paraphrases. Raw monolingual data provides a complementary and orthogonal source of information that lessens the commonly observed errors in bilingual pivotbased methods. Our experiments reveal that monolingual scoring of bilingually extracted paraphrases has...

We propose a new approach to rendering speech of different languages with only a speaker’s monolingual recordings for mixed-code TTS applications. A reference speaker in the target language (say Chinese) is used to help building the target language TTS with “tiles” of the original source speaker‘s monolingual (say English) data. The difference between the monolingual source speaker and the refe...

Web search quality can vary widely across languages, even for the same information need. We propose to exploit this variation in quality by learning a ranking function on bilingual queries: queries that appear in query logs for two languages but represent equivalent search interests. For a given bilingual query, along with corresponding monolingual query log and monolingual ranking, we generate...

We investigate how second language learning affects ‘thinking for speaking’ in the first and second language by examining the semantic effects of grammatical gender (present in Italian but absent in English). In an error-induction experiment we first establish a baseline, showing that gender affects the semantic substitution errors made by monolingual Italian speakers compared to monolingual En...

Word segmentation skills emerge during infancy, but it is unclear to what extent this ability is shaped by experience listening to a specific language or language type. This issue was explored by comparing segmentation of bi-syllabic words in monolingual and bilingual 7.5-month-old learners of French and English. In a native-language condition, monolingual infants segmented bi-syllabic words wi...

This paper presents the 2007 MIRACLE’s team approach to the AdHoc Information Retrieval track. The main work carried out for this campaign has been around monolingual experiments, in the standard and in the robust tracks. The most important contributions have been the general introduction of automatic named-entities extraction and the use of wikipedia resources. For the 2007 campaign, runs were...

We address the problem of performing polarity classification on Twitter over different languages, focusing on English and Spanish, comparing three techniques: (1) a monolingual model which knows the language in which the opinion is written, (2) a monolingual model that acts based on the decision provided by a language identification tool and (3) a multilingual model trained on a multilingual da...

This paper presents a question answering (QA) system called Tikka. Tikka’s approach to QA relies heavily on the semantic annotation of text documents and on the usage of answer extraction patterns. In this way, Tikka applies to QA pattern-based techniques traditionally used in named entity recognition and information extraction. In the experiments presented in this paper, Tikka’s performance is...