writing has always been considered an important literacy skill for foreign/second language learners. the internet provides such unique applications for the writing skill as weblogs, wikis, and social networking websites. up to now researchers have put their focus on the learners’ performances in the traditional paper and pencil environment or wikis and blogs it is time to also consider learners...

This paper describes the Nara Institute of Science and Technology’s system for the entrance exam pilot task of CLEF 2013 QA4MRE. The core of the system is a similar to the system for the main task of CLEF 2013 QA4MRE. We use minimum error rate training (MERT) to train the weights of the model and also propose a novel method for MERT with the addition of a threshold that defines the certainty wi...

NRC’s Portage system participated in the English-French (E-F) and French-English (F-E) translation tasks of the ACL WMT 2010 evaluation. The most notable improvement over earlier versions of Portage is an efficient implementation of lattice MERT. While Portage has typically performed well in Chinese to English MT evaluations, most recently in the NIST09 evaluation, our participation in WMT 2010...

Deploying a system in an agile development environment presents its own set of challenges. If it is true that development cycles are short and that every release is as small as possible, then we are going to be releasing software much more frequently than with other methodologies. Related to this is the concept that the system is never finished, and deployments have to occur throughout the life...

Recently importance of hands-free speech communication is increasingly recognized. The sound data for open evaluation is necessary for the studies such as sound source localization, sound retrieval, sound recognition and hands-free speech recognition in real acoustic environments. This paper reports on our project for the acoustic data collection. There are many kinds of sounds in real environm...

This paper describes the NICT SMT system used in the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) 2009 evaluation campaign. We participated in the Challenge Task. Our system was based on a fairly common phrase-based machine translation system. We used two methods for stabilizing MERT.

In the last decade, there have been a countless number of researches in soft syntactic features many of which have led to the improved performance for Hiero. However, it seems that all the syntactic constituent features cannot efficiently work together in the Hiero optimized by MERT. In this paper, we propose a more general soft syntactic constraint model based on discriminative classifiers for...

Train Dev (MERT) Test EJ: # parallel sentences (Helios) 2,963,963 2,000 2,000 # En words 86,048,310 63,825 E2J: 70,624 J2E: 69,521 # Ja words (% particles) 98,923,854 72,987 E2J: 78,587 J2E: 74,070 EJ: # parallel sentences (Akamon) 2,018,214 2,000 2,000 Enju parse success rate 98.5% 98.8% 98.3% # En words 49,474,332 63,825 70,624 # Ja words (% particles) 53,271,286 73,462 73,984 CE: # parallel ...

Industrial production is facing major challenges with regard to flexibility and productivity during the manufacturing process. Due to the dynamic of product lifecycles, the number of product variants manufactured in the same production environment is continuously increasing. This paper explains the principles and the necessity for service-based planning and control of cyber-physical production ...