In this paper we describe initial steps in constructing a Czech-Russian dependency treebank and discuss the perspectives of its development. Following the experience of the Czech-English Parallel Treebank we have taken a syntactically annotated “gold standard” text for one language (Russian) and run an automatic annotation on the respective parallel text for the other language (Czech). Our tree...

This paper studies the problem of automated educational test generation. We describe a procedure for generating cloze test items from Russian-language text, which consists of three steps: sentence splitting, sentence filtering, and question generation. The sentence filtering issue is discussed as an application of automatic summarization techniques. We describe a simple experimental system whic...

We describe the CMU systems submitted to the 2013 WMT shared task in machine translation. We participated in three language pairs, French–English, Russian– English, and English–Russian. Our particular innovations include: a labelcoarsening scheme for syntactic tree-totree translation and the use of specialized modules to create “synthetic translation options” that can both generalize beyond wha...

Some considerations are presented regarding certain aspects of automatically translating Russian predicative infinitives into English. Emphasis is placed on the analysis (decoding) of the pertinent infinitive constructions in the source language rather than on the synthesis (encoding) of their equivalents in the target language. The paper does not aim at an exhaustive treatment of the problem, ...

Different demographics, e.g., gender or age, can demonstrate substantial variation in their language use, particularly in informal contexts such as social media. In this paper we focus on learning gender differences in the use of subjective language in English, Spanish, and Russian Twitter data, and explore cross-cultural differences in emoticon and hashtag use for male and female users. We sho...

This study compares patterns of consonant-to-consonant timing at word boundaries in English and Russian and investigates the roles of transfer and the emergence of linguistic universals in second language (L2) articulation. Native Russian speakers learning English and native English speakers learning Russian produced phrases in English and Russian contrasting VC#CV, VC#V, and V#CV sequences. Th...

Research focusing on autobiographical memory in bilingual speakers has revealed different patterns of memory retrieval depending upon the language in which memories are being accessed. The present study examined narrative properties of autobiographical memories retrieved by RussianEnglish bilinguals. Results suggest that bilinguals’ languages may influence cognitive styles. When speaking Englis...

Anna Feldman and Jirka Hana had a problem. Wanting to extract Russian verb frames, they lacked a tool for the necessary first step: morphological analysis of Russian words, disambiguated for context. To avoid the significant overhead of building a contextual-ized morphological analyzer from scratch, Feldman and Hana wondered if an analyzer that was already available for Czech would perform adeq...

The paper discusses the history of development of Russian corpora and presents methods and tools that are used in the ongoing development of the Russian Reference Corpus. Development of the corpus follows the key design principles of the BNC and extends them further by introducing an elaborate model of text typology and by adding lemmatisation and morphosyntactic annotations to POS tagging. The...