We report results on translation of SMS messages from Haitian Creole to English. We show improvements by applying spell checking techniques to unknown words and creating a lattice with the best known spelling equivalents. We also used a small cleaned corpus to train a cleaning model that we applied to the noisy corpora.

Spelling issues tend to create relatively minor (though still complex) problems for corpus linguistics, information retrieval and natural language processing tasks that use ‘standard’ or modern varieties of English. For example, in corpus annotation, we have to decide how to deal with tokenisation issues such as whether (i) periods represent sentence boundaries or acronyms and (ii) apostrophes ...

The development of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) arises from the need to improve reproductive conditions, ensuring births in humans. Progress in this area of research has enabled the possibility of sperm selection with adequate morphological characteristics to ensure fertilization, embryo development, pregnancy and birth. However, further studies are required to increase reproductive...

The termwe used to describe the study of alternative futures is important. Disciplines and discourses do not emerge from a vacuum but have a history and a cultural context; and their names can hide as much as they reveal. This paper examines such terms as ‘futurology’ and ‘foresight’, and argues that to emphasise plurality and diversity the study of the future is best served by the moniker ‘fut...

Cylindrical algebraic decomposition (CAD) is an important tool for the investigation of semi-algebraic sets, with applications within algebraic geometry and beyond. We recently reported on a new implementation of CAD in Maple which implemented the original algorithm of Collins and the subsequent improvement to projection by McCallum. Our implementation was in contrast to Maple’s in-built CAD co...

This study measures comparative lexical and syntactic closure rates in annotated Chinese newspaper corpora from the Academica Sinica Balanced Corpus and the University of Pennsylvania's Chinese Treebank. It then draws inferences as to how large such corpora need be to be representative models of subject-matterconstrained language domains within the same genre. Future large corpora should be bui...

This paper presents a discriminative reranking model for the discourse segmentation task, the first step in a discourse parsing system. Our model exploits subtree features to rerank Nbest outputs of a base segmenter, which uses syntactic and lexical features in a CRF framework. Experimental results on the RST Discourse Treebank corpus show that our model outperforms existing discourse segmenter...

This book is a long-needed study of certain verbal collocations in English which – on the basis of semantic and syntactic similarities – Claudia Claridge groups together as 'multi-word verbs', including: phrasal verbs (burn N down [transitive], fly away [intransitive]), prepositional verbs (agree to N), phrasal prepositional verbs (look down on N [transitive], put N down to N [ditransitive]), v...

Musicians at all levels of proficiency must deal with performance errors and have to find strategies for avoiding them. As their level of skill increases, errors occur less frequently, tend to be more subtle, and mostly go unnoticed by the audience. The phenomena of performance errors have been investigated before. However, precise performance data is difficult to acquire, as the automatic extr...

This paper is concerned with the ways in which Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) affect women’s lives and perceptions regarding their infertility, contraception and reproductive health. The paper is based on a qualitative feminist survey study to explore and analyze issues arising from the use of ARTs by women in New Delhi, the capital of India. A rapid growth in the number of fertility...