In statistical machine translation, data sparsity is a challenging problem especially for languages with rich morphology and inconsistent orthography, such as Persian. We show that orthographic preprocessing and morphological segmentation of Persian verbs in particular improves the translation quality of Persian-English by 1.9 BLEU points on a blind test set.

Spelling errors in digital documents are often caused by operational and cognitive mistakes, or by the lack of full knowledge about the language of the written documents. Computer-assisted solutions can help to detect and suggest replacements. In this paper, we present a new string distance metric for the Persian language to rank respelling suggestions of a misspelled Persian word by considerin...

OBJECTIVE Persian leek is one of the most widely used herbal foods among Iranians. In this study, effects of oral administration of Persian leek on plasma and liver lipids were examined in hamster. MATERIALS AND METHODS Male Syrian hamsters were randomly divided into three groups: control (standard diet), high fat control (high-fat/high-cholesterol diet), Persian leek (high-fat/high-cholester...

BACKGROUND Fear of falling may be related to falling during stroke onset. The Fall Efficacy ScaleInternational (FES-I) with excellent psychometric properties, is an instrument developed to assess patients' concerns about fallings. The aim of this study was to determine validation of this scale in Iranian patients with stroke. METHODS The "forward-backward" procedure was applied to translate t...

We present a dependency parser for Persian, called ParsPer, developed using the graph-based parser in the Mate Tools. The parser is trained on the entire Uppsala Persian Dependency Treebank with a specific configuration that was selected by MaltParser as the best performing parsing representation. The treebank’s syntactic annotation scheme is based on Stanford Typed Dependencies with extensions...

A novel technique is introduced for verb and inflection detection in Persian texts. This recognition can be useful for preprocessing phase in natural language processing (NLP) and text mining like partof-speech (POS) tagging and sentence boundary detection (SBD) in Persian texts. Our technique employs structural information of Persian verb for the first phase of this detection and then uses the...

This paper describes the systems submitted by FBK for the MT track of IWSLT 2013. We participated in the EnglishFrench as well as the bidirectional Persian-English translation tasks. We report substantial improvements in our English-French systems over last year’s baselines, largely due to improved techniques of combining translation and language models. For our Persian-English and English-Pers...

Tajik Persian is a dialect of Persian spoken primarily in Tajikistan and written with a modified Cyrillic alphabet. Iranian Persian, or Farsi, as it is natively called, is the lingua franca of Iran and is written with the Persian alphabet, a modified Arabic script. Although the spoken versions of Tajik and Farsi are mutually intelligible to educated speakers of both languages, the difference be...

BACKGROUND A clinical outcome tool is needed for the assessment of young athletes with low back pain. OBJECTIVES To translate and culturally adapt the Micheli functional scale (MFS), a self-report questionnaire developed to evaluate young athletes with low back pain (LBP) into Persian language and examine the reliability and validity of the Persian MFS (PMFS). MATERIALS AND METHODS A cross-...