Building And Using Comparable Corpora For Multilingual Natural Language Processing

This book provides a comprehensive overview of methods to build comparable corpora and of their applications, including machine translation, cross-lingual transfer, and various kinds of multilingual natural language processing. The authors begin with a brief history on the topic followed by a comparison to parallel resources and an explanation of why comparable corpora have become more widely used. In particular, they provide the basis for the multilingual capabilities of pre-trained models, such as BERT or GPT. The book then focuses on building comparable corpora, aligning their sentences to create a database of suitable translations, and using these sentence translations to produce dictionaries and term banks. Then, it is explained how comparable corpora can be used to build machine translation engines and to develop a wide variety of multilingual applications.

The 1990s saw a paradigm change in the use of corpus-driven methods in NLP. In the field of multilingual NLP (such as machine translation and terminology mining) this implied the use of parallel corpora. However, parallel resources are relatively scarce: many more texts are produced daily by native speakers of any given language than translated. This situation resulted in a natural drive towards the use of comparable corpora, i.e. non-parallel texts in the same domain or genre. Nevertheless, this research direction has not produced a single authoritative source suitable for researchers and students coming to the field. The proposed volume provides a reference source, identifying the state of the art in the field as well as future trends. The book is intended for specialists and students in natural language processing, machine translation and computer-assisted translation.

This book provides an overview of how comparable corpora can be used to overcome the lack of parallel resources when building machine translation systems for under-resourced languages and domains. It presents a wealth of methods and open tools for building comparable corpora from the Web, evaluating comparability and extracting parallel data that can be used for the machine translation task. It is divided into several sections, each covering a specific task such as building, processing, and using comparable corpora, focusing particularly on under-resourced language pairs and domains. The book is intended for anyone interested in data-driven machine translation for under-resourced languages and domains, especially for developers of machine translation systems, computational linguists and language workers. It offers a valuable resource for specialists and students in natural language processing, machine translation, corpus linguistics and computer-assisted translation, and promotes the broader use of comparable corpora in natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Multilingual Natural Language Processing Applications is the first comprehensive single-source guide to building robust and accurate multilingual NLP systems. Edited by two leading experts, it integrates cutting-edge advances with practical solutions drawn from extensive field experience. Part I introduces the core concepts and theoretical foundations of modern multilingual natural language processing, presenting today’s best practices for understanding word and document structure, analyzing syntax, modeling language, recognizing entailment, and detecting redundancy. Part II thoroughly addresses the practical considerations associated with building real-world applications, including information extraction, machine translation, information retrieval/search, summarization, question answering, distillation, processing pipelines, and more. This book contains important new contributions from leading researchers at IBM, Google, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, BBN, CMU, University of Edinburgh, University of Washington, University of North Texas, and others. Coverage includes Core NLP problems, and today’s best algorithms for attacking them Processing the diverse morphologies present in the world’s languages Uncovering syntactical structure, parsing semantics, using semantic role labeling, and scoring grammaticality Recognizing inferences, subjectivity, and opinion polarity Managing key algorithmic and design tradeoffs in real-world applications Extracting information via mention detection, coreference resolution, and events Building large-scale systems for machine translation, information retrieval, and summarization Answering complex questions through distillation and other advanced techniques Creating dialog systems that leverage advances in speech recognition, synthesis, and dialog management Constructing common infrastructure for multiple multilingual text processing applications This book will be invaluable for all engineers, software developers, researchers, and graduate students who want to process large quantities of text in multiple languages, in any environment: government, corporate, or academic.

l This book evolved from the ARCADE evaluation exercise that started in 1995. The project's goal is to evaluate alignment systems for parallel texts, i. e. , texts accompanied by their translation. Thirteen teams from various places around the world have participated so far and for the first time, some ten to fifteen years after the first alignment techniques were designed, the community has been able to get a clear picture of the behaviour of alignment systems. Several chapters in this book describe the details of competing systems, and the last chapter is devoted to the description of the evaluation protocol and results. The remaining chapters were especially commissioned from researchers who have been major figures in the field in recent years, in an attempt to address a wide range of topics that describe the state of the art in parallel text processing and use. As I recalled in the introduction, the Rosetta stone won eternal fame as the prototype of parallel texts, but such texts are probably almost as old as the invention of writing. Nowadays, parallel texts are electronic, and they are be coming an increasingly important resource for building the natural language processing tools needed in the "multilingual information society" that is cur rently emerging at an incredible speed. Applications are numerous, and they are expanding every day: multilingual lexicography and terminology, machine and human translation, cross-language information retrieval, language learning, etc.

This book brings together scientists, researchers, practitioners, and students from academia and industry to present recent and ongoing research activities concerning the latest advances, techniques, and applications of natural language processing systems, and to promote the exchange of new ideas and lessons learned. Taken together, the chapters of this book provide a collection of high-quality research works that address broad challenges in both theoretical and applied aspects of intelligent natural language processing. The book presents the state-of-the-art in research on natural language processing, computational linguistics, applied Arabic linguistics and related areas. New trends in natural language processing systems are rapidly emerging – and finding application in various domains including education, travel and tourism, and healthcare, among others. Many issues encountered during the development of these applications can be resolved by incorporating language technology solutions. The topics covered by the book include: Character and Speech Recognition; Morphological, Syntactic, and Semantic Processing; Information Extraction; Information Retrieval and Question Answering; Text Classification and Text Mining; Text Summarization; Sentiment Analysis; Machine Translation Building and Evaluating Linguistic Resources; and Intelligent Language Tutoring Systems.

This volume assesses the state of the art of parallel corpus research as a whole, reporting on advances in both recent developments of parallel corpora – with some particular references to comparable corpora as well– and in ways of exploiting them for a variety of purposes. The first part of the book is devoted to new roles that parallel corpora can and should assume in translation studies and in contrastive linguistics, to the usefulness and usability of parallel corpora, and to advances in parallel corpus alignment, annotation and retrieval. There follows an up-to-date presentation of a number of parallel corpus projects currently being carried out in Europe, some of them multimodal, with certain chapters illustrating case studies developed on the basis of the corpora at hand. In most of these chapters, attention is paid to specific technical issues of corpus building. The third part of the book reflects on specific applications and on the creation of bilingual resources from parallel corpora. This volume will be welcomed by scholars, postgraduate and PhD students in the fields of contrastive linguistics, translation studies, lexicography, language teaching and learning, machine translation, and natural language processing.

This book contains papers from the Fourth International Conference on Human Language Technologies - the Baltic Perspective (Baltic HLT 2010), held in Riga in October 2010. This conference is the latest in a series which provides a forum for sharing recent advances in human language processing, and promotes cooperation between the computer science and linguistics communities of the Baltic countries and the rest of the world. Bringing together scientists, developers, providers and users, the conference is an opportunity to exchange information, discuss problems, find new synergies, and promote i.