Language Engineering For Lesser Studied Languages

"Technologies enabling computers to process specific languages facilitate economic and political progress of societies where these languages are spoken. Development of methods and systems for language processing is therefore a worthy goal for national governments as well as for business entities and scientific and educational institutions in every country in the world. As work on systems and resources for the 'lower-density' languages becomes more widespread, an important question is how to leverage the results and experience accumulated by the field of computational linguistics for the major languages in the development of resources and systems for lower-density languages. This issue has been at the core of the NATO Advanced Studies Institute on language technologies for middle- and low-density languages held in Georgia in October 2007. This publication is a collection - of publication-oriented versions - of the lectures presented there and is a useful source of knowledge about many core facets of modern computational-linguistic work. By the same token, it can serve as a reference source for people interested in learning about strategies that are best suited for developing computational-linguistic capabilities for lesser-studied languages - either 'from scratch' or using components developed for other languages. The book should also be quite useful in teaching practical system- and resource-building topics in computational linguistics."--Site Web de l'éditeur.

Research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has rapidly advanced in recent years, resulting in exciting algorithms for sophisticated processing of text and speech in various languages. Much of this work focuses on English; in this book we address another group of interesting and challenging languages for NLP research: the Semitic languages. The Semitic group of languages includes Arabic (206 million native speakers), Amharic (27 million), Hebrew (7 million), Tigrinya (6.7 million), Syriac (1 million) and Maltese (419 thousand). Semitic languages exhibit unique morphological processes, challenging syntactic constructions and various other phenomena that are less prevalent in other natural languages. These challenges call for unique solutions, many of which are described in this book. The 13 chapters presented in this book bring together leading scientists from several universities and research institutes worldwide. While this book devotes some attention to cutting-edge algorithms and techniques, its primary purpose is a thorough explication of best practices in the field. Furthermore, every chapter describes how the techniques discussed apply to Semitic languages. The book covers both statistical approaches to NLP, which are dominant across various applications nowadays and the more traditional, rule-based approaches, that were proven useful for several other application domains. We hope that this book will provide a "one-stop-shop'' for all the requisite background and practical advice when building NLP applications for Semitic languages.

This volume brings together the latest findings from research on multilingual language learning and use in multilingual communities. Suzanne Flynn, Håkan Ringbom and Larissa Aronin are some of the prestigious scholars who have contributed to this book. As argued by this last author in her chapter, although multilingualism has always existed, the important changes that research on this phenomenon has recently undergone, like that of adopting a multilingual perspective in its studies, should always be borne in mind. This volume considers the languages of multilingual communities, as well as the interaction among them. As such, the chapters adopt a multilingual approach that guides the analysis of grammatical, lexical and pragmatic development together with the role of affective and social factors in multilingual settings. Furthermore, this edited monograph is not restricted to an age group in the scope of its studies, as it contains research on children, teenagers, young adults and adults. In addition, it covers a wide range of sociolinguistic settings, including English-speaking countries, like the United Kingdom and Canada, and Northern and Central European contexts such as Sweden and Germany, as well as Southern settings like Spain and Tunisia. This book will be relevant to both researchers and teachers due to its educational and sociolinguistic orientation, dealing as it does with language learners from various multilingual communities and describing the social representation of languages and the measures for their promotion.

Offers an account of multilingualism, a phenomenon affecting a vast number of communities, thousands of languages and millions of language users. This book focuses on the knowledge and use of multiple languages. It deals with both bilingualism and polyglottism, at the level of the individual speaker as well as at the societal level.

This book provides system developers and researchers in natural language processing and computational linguistics with the necessary background information for working with the Arabic language. The goal is to introduce Arabic linguistic phenomena and review the state-of-the-art in Arabic processing. The book discusses Arabic script, phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax and semantics, with a final chapter on machine translation issues. The chapter sizes correspond more or less to what is linguistically distinctive about Arabic, with morphology getting the lion's share, followed by Arabic script. No previous knowledge of Arabic is needed. This book is designed for computer scientists and linguists alike. The focus of the book is on Modern Standard Arabic; however, notes on practical issues related to Arabic dialects and languages written in the Arabic script are presented in different chapters. Table of Contents: What is "Arabic"? / Arabic Script / Arabic Phonology and Orthography / Arabic Morphology / Computational Morphology Tasks / Arabic Syntax / A Note on Arabic Semantics / A Note on Arabic and Machine Translation

This volume provides an up-to-date survey of the field of corpus linguistics, a field whose methodology has revolutionized much of the empirical work done in most fields of linguistic study over the past decade. Corpus linguistics investigates human language by starting out from large collections of texts - spoken, written, or recorded. These language corpora, which are now regularly available in electronic form, are the basis for quantitative and qualitative research on almost any question of linguistic interest. Many techniques that are in use in corpus linguistics today are rooted in the tradition of the late 18th and 19th century, when linguistics began to make use of mathematical and empirical methods. Modern corpus linguistics has used and developed these methods in close connection with computer science and computational linguistics. The handbook sketches the history of corpus linguistics, shows its potential, discusses its problems, and describes various methods of collecting, annotating, and searching corpora as well as processing corpus data. It also reports case studies that illustrate the wide range of linguistic research questions addressed in corpus linguistics. The over 60 articles included in the handbook are divided into five sections: (1) the origins and history of corpus linguistics and surveys of its relationship to central fields of linguistics (2) corpus compilation (3) corpus types (4) preprocessing of corpora (5) the use and exploitation of corpora. The final section gives an overview of the results of corpus studies obtained in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, stylometry, dialectology, and discourse analysis. It also reports on recent advances made in human and machine translation, contrastive studies, computer-assisted language learning, and automatic summarization. The contributors to the volume are internationally known experts in their respective fields. The handbook is intended for a wide audience ranging from teachers, university students, and scholars to anyone interested in the use of computers in linguistic analyses and applications.

Language description enriches linguistic theory and linguistic theory sharpens language description. Based on evidence from the world's languages, functional-typological linguistics has established a number of thorough generalizations about the nature of linguistic categorizations and their manifestation in natural languages. Empirical studies in these fields of linguistics have contributed to sharpen linguistic theory in several respects. This volume is a collection of 19 contributions from outstanding scholars in the field of functional-typological linguistics that address fundamental issues in the study of language, such as the nature of linguistic categories, the constitution of functional domains, and the form of cross-linguistic continua. Empirical data from individual languages and from typological samples are investigated in order to achieve generalizations about the properties of human grammar(s). Several grammatical phenomena are dealt with including tonal systems, person distinctions, modalities, reciprocity, complex predicates, grammatical relations, word order, clause linkage, and information structure. The structure of the book illustrates the fundamental importance of the analytical distinction between the onomasiological and the semasiological approach to language and language diversity. Both perspectives are integrated in most papers with a dominant focus on either the former or the latter perspective.