2014
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Handling entities in MT/CAT/HLT
Keith Miller
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Linda Moreau
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Sherri Condon
Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Tutorials
2012
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International Multicultural Name Matching Competition: Design, Execution, Results, and Lessons Learned
Keith J. Miller
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Elizabeth Schroeder Richerson
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Sarah McLeod
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James Finley
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Aaron Schein
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
This paper describes different aspects of an open competition to evaluate multicultural name matching software, including the contest design, development of the test data, different phases of the competition, behavior of the participating teams, results of the competition, and lessons learned throughout. The competition, known as The MITRE Challengeâ¢, was informally announced at LREC 2010 and was recently concluded. Contest participants used the competition website (
http://mitrechallenge.mitre.org) to download the competition data set and guidelines, upload results, and to view accuracy metrics for each result set submitted. Participants were allowed to submit unlimited result sets, with their top-scoring set determining their overall ranking. The competition website featured a leader board that displayed the top score for each participant, ranked according to the principal contest metric - mean average precision (MAP). MAP and other metrics were calculated in near-real time on a remote server, based on ground truth developed for the competition data set. Additional measures were taken to guard against gaming the competition metric or overfitting to the competition data set. Lessons learned during running this first MITRE Challenge will be valuable to others considering running similar evaluation campaigns.
2010
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Improving Personal Name Search in the TIGR System
Keith J. Miller
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Sarah McLeod
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Elizabeth Schroeder
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Mark Arehart
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Kenneth Samuel
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James Finley
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Vanesa Jurica
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John Polk
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
This paper describes the development and evaluation of enhancements to the specialized information retrieval capabilities of a multimodal reporting system. The system enables collection and dissemination of information through a distributed data architecture by allowing users to input free text documents, which are indexed for subsequent search and retrieval by other users. This unstructured data entry method is essential for users of this system, but it requires an intelligent support system for processing queries against the data. The system, known as TIGR (Tactical Ground Reporting), allows keyword searching and geospatial filtering of results, but lacked the ability to efficiently index and search person names and perform approximate name matching. To improve TIGRs ability to provide accurate, comprehensive results for queries on person names we iteratively updated existing entity extraction and name matching technologies to better align with the TIGR use case. We evaluated each version of the entity extraction and name matching components to find the optimal configuration for the TIGR context, and combined those pieces into a named entity extraction, indexing, and search module that integrates with the current TIGR system. By comparing system-level evaluations of the original and updated TIGR search processes, we show that our enhancements to personal name search significantly improved the performance of the overall information retrieval capabilities of the TIGR system.
2008
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Adjudicator Agreement and System Rankings for Person Name Search
Mark Arehart
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Chris Wolf
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Keith J. Miller
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
We have analyzed system rankings for person name search algorithms using a data set for which several versions of ground truth were developed by employing different means of resolving adjudicator conflicts. Thirteen algorithms were ranked by F-score, using bootstrap resampling for significance testing, on a dataset containing 70,000 romanized names from various cultures. We found some disagreement among the four adjudicators, with kappa ranging from 0.57 to 0.78. Truth sets based on a single adjudicator, and on the intersection or union of positive adjudications produced sizeable variability in scoring sensitivity - and to a lesser degree rank order - compared to the consensus truth set. However, results on truth sets constructed by randomly choosing an adjudicator for each item were highly consistent with the consensus. The implication is that an evaluation where one adjudicator has judged each item is nearly as good as a more expensive and labor-intensive one where multiple adjudicators have judged each item and conflicts are resolved through voting.
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A Ground Truth Dataset for Matching Culturally Diverse Romanized Person Names
Mark Arehart
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Keith J. Miller
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
This paper describes the development of a ground truth dataset of culturally diverse Romanized names in which approximately 70,000 names are matched against a subset of 700. We ran the subset as queries against the complete list using several matchers, created adjudication pools, adjudicated the results, and compiled two versions of ground truth based on different sets of adjudication guidelines and methods for resolving adjudicator conflicts. The name list, drawn from publicly available sources, was manually seeded with over 1500 name variants. These names include transliteration variation, database fielding errors, segmentation differences, incomplete names, titles, initials, abbreviations, nicknames, typos, OCR errors, and truncated data. These diverse types of matches, along with the coincidental name similarities already in the list, make possible a comprehensive evaluation of name matching systems. We have used the dataset to evaluate several open source and commercial algorithms and provide some of those results.
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An Infrastructure, Tools and Methodology for Evaluation of Multicultural Name Matching Systems
Keith J. Miller
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Mark Arehart
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Catherine Ball
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John Polk
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Alan Rubenstein
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Kenneth Samuel
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Elizabeth Schroeder
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Eva Vecchi
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Chris Wolf
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
This paper describes a Name Matching Evaluation Laboratory that is a joint effort across multiple projects. The lab houses our evaluation infrastructure as well as multiple name matching engines and customized analytical tools. Included is an explanation of the methodology used by the lab to carry out evaluations. This methodology is based on standard information retrieval evaluation, which requires a carefully-constructed test data set. The paper describes how we created that test data set, including the ground truth used to score the systems performance. Descriptions and snapshots of the labs various tools are provided, as well as information on how the different tools are used throughout the evaluation process. By using this evaluation process, the lab has been able to identify strengths and weaknesses of different name matching engines. These findings have led the lab to an ongoing investigation into various techniques for combining results from multiple name matching engines to achieve optimal results, as well as into research on the more general problem of identity management and resolution.
2006
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What‘s in a Name: Current Methods, Applications, and Evaluation in Multilingual Name Search and Matching
Sherri Condon
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Keith Miller
Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the NAACL, Companion Volume: Tutorial Abstracts
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Parallel Syntactic Annotation of Multiple Languages
Owen Rambow
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Bonnie Dorr
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David Farwell
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Rebecca Green
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Nizar Habash
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Stephen Helmreich
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Eduard Hovy
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Lori Levin
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Keith J. Miller
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Teruko Mitamura
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Florence Reeder
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Advaith Siddharthan
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)
This paper describes an effort to investigate the incrementally deepening development of an interlingua notation, validated by human annotation of texts in English plus six languages. We begin with deep syntactic annotation, and in this paper present a series of annotation manuals for six different languages at the deep-syntactic level of representation. Many syntactic differences between languages are removed in the proposed syntactic annotation, making them useful resources for multilingual NLP projects with semantic components.
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Formal v. Informal: Register-Differentiated Arabic MT Evaluation in the PLATO Paradigm
Keith J. Miller
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Michelle Vanni
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)
Tasks performed on machine translation (MT) output are associated with input text types such as genre and topic. Predictive Linguistic Assessments of Translation Output, or PLATO, MT Evaluation (MTE) explores a predictive relationship between linguistic metrics and the information processing tasks reliably performable on output. PLATO assigns a linguistic signature, which cuts across the task-based and automated metric paradigms. Here we report on PLATO assessments of clarity, coherence, morphology, syntax, lexical robustness, name-rendering, and terminology in a comparison of Arabic MT engines in which register differentiates the input. With a team of 10 assessors employing eight linguistic tests, we analyzed the results of five systems processing of 10 input texts from two distinct linguistic registers: a total we analyzed 800 data sets. The analysis pointed to specific areas, such as general lexical robustness, where system performance was comparable on both types of input. Divergent performance, however, was observed on clarity and name-rendering assessments. These results suggest that, while systems may be considered reliable regardless of input register for the lexicon-dependent triage task, register may have an affect on the suitability of MT systems output for relevance judgment and information extraction tasks, which rely on clearness and proper named-entity rendering. Further, we show that the evaluation metrics incorporated in PLATO differentiate between MT systems performance on a text type for which they are presumably optimized and one on which they are not.
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Name Translation
Keith Miller
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Sherri Condon
Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Tutorials
2005
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Inter-rater Agreement Measures, and the Refinement of Metrics in the PLATO MT Evaluation Paradigm
Keith J. Miller
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Michelle Vanni
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit X: Papers
2004
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Interlingual annotation for MT development
Florence Reeder
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Bonnie Dorr
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David Farwell
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Nizar Habash
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Stephen Helmreich
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Eduard Hovy
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Lori Levin
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Teruko Mitamura
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Keith Miller
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Owen Rambow
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Advaith Siddharthan
Proceedings of the 6th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers
MT systems that use only superficial representations, including the current generation of statistical MT systems, have been successful and useful. However, they will experience a plateau in quality, much like other “silver bullet” approaches to MT. We pursue work on the development of interlingual representations for use in symbolic or hybrid MT systems. In this paper, we describe the creation of an interlingua and the development of a corpus of semantically annotated text, to be validated in six languages and evaluated in several ways. We have established a distributed, well-functioning research methodology, designed a preliminary interlingua notation, created annotation manuals and tools, developed a test collection in six languages with associated English translations, annotated some 150 translations, and designed and applied various annotation metrics. We describe the data sets being annotated and the interlingual (IL) representation language which uses two ontologies and a systematic theta-role list. We present the annotation tools built and outline the annotation process. Following this, we describe our evaluation methodology and conclude with a summary of issues that have arisen.
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Interlingual Annotation of Multilingual Text Corpora
Stephen Helmreich
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David Farwell
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Bonnie Dorr
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Nizar Habash
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Lori Levin
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Teruko Mitamura
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Florence Reeder
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Keith Miller
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Eduard Hovy
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Owen Rambow
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Advaith Siddharthan
Proceedings of the Workshop Frontiers in Corpus Annotation at HLT-NAACL 2004
2002
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Scaling the ISLE Framework: Use of Existing Corpus Resources for Validation of MT Evaluation Metrics across Languages
Michelle Vanni
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Keith Miller
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’02)
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Sharing Problems and Solutions for Machine Translation of Spoken and Written Interaction
Sherri Condon
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Keith Miller
Proceedings of the ACL-02 Workshop on Speech-to-Speech Translation: Algorithms and Systems
2001
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Integrated Feasibility Experiment for Bio-Security: IFE-Bio, A TIDES Demonstration
Lynette Hirschman
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Kris Concepcion
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Laurie Damianos
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David Day
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John Delmore
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Lisa Ferro
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John Griffith
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John Henderson
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Jeff Kurtz
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Inderjeet Mani
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Scott Mardis
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Tom McEntee
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Keith Miller
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Beverly Nunam
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Jay Ponte
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Florence Reeder
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Ben Wellner
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George Wilson
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Alex Yeh
Proceedings of the First International Conference on Human Language Technology Research
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Scaling the ISLE taxonomy: development of metrics for the multi-dimensional characterization of machine translation quality
Keith J. Miller
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Michelle Vanni
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit VIII
The DARPA MT evaluations of the early 1990s, along with subsequent work on the MT Scale, and the International Standards for Language Engineering (ISLE) MT Evaluation framework represent two of the principal efforts in Machine Translation Evaluation (MTE) over the past decade. We describe a research program that builds on both of these efforts. This paper focuses on the selection of MT output features suggested in the ISLE framework, as well as the development of metrics for the features to be used in the study. We define each metric and describe the rationale for its development. We also discuss several of the finer points of the evaluation measures that arose as a result of verification of the measures against sample output texts from three machine translation systems.
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Evaluating machine translation output for an unknown source language: report of an ISLE-based investigation
Keith J. Miller
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Donna M. Gates
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Nancy Underwood
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Josemina Magdalen
Workshop on MT Evaluation
It is often assumed that knowledge of both the source and target languages is necessary in order to evaluate the output of a machine translation (MT) system. This paper reports on an experimental evaluation of Chinese-English MT and Spanish-English MT from output specifically designed for evaluators who do not read or speak Chinese or Spanish. An outline of the characteristics measured and evaluation follows.
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The naming of things and the confusion of tongues: an MT metric
Florence Reeder
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Keith Miller
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Jennifer Doyon
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John White
Workshop on MT Evaluation
This paper reports the results of an experiment in machine translation (MT) evaluation, designed to determine whether easily/rapidly collected metrics can predict the human generated quality parameters of MT output. In this experiment we evaluated a system’s ability to translate named entities, and compared this measure with previous evaluation scores of fidelity and intelligibility. There are two significant benefits potentially associated with a correlation between traditional MT measures and named entity scores: the ability to automate named entity scoring and thus MT scoring; and insights into the linguistic aspects of task-based uses of MT, as captured in previous studies.
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Scaling the ISLE framework: validating tests of machine translation quality for multi-dimensional measurement
Michelle Vanni
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Keith J. Miller
Workshop on MT Evaluation
Work on comparing a set of linguistic test scores for MT output to a set of the same tests’ scores for naturally-occurring target language text (Jones and Rusk 2000) broke new ground in automating MT Evaluation. However, the tests used were selected on an ad hoc basis. In this paper, we report on work to extend our understanding, through refinement and validation, of suitable linguistic tests in the context of our novel approach to MTE. This approach was introduced in Miller and Vanni (2001a) and employs standard, rather than randomly-chosen, tests of MT output quality selected from the ISLE framework as well as a scoring system for predicting the type of information processing task performable with the output. Since the intent is to automate the scoring system, this work can also be viewed as the preliminary steps of algorithm design.
1998
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An Architecture for Dialogue Management, Context Tracking, and Pragmatic Adaptation in Spoken Dialogue Systems
Susann LuperFoy
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Dan Loehr
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David Duff
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Keith Miller
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Florence Reeder
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Lisa Harper
COLING 1998 Volume 2: The 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
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Lexicons as gold: mining, embellishment and reuse
Keith J. Miller
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David M. Zajic
Proceedings of the Third Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers
Given the high labor costs of developing new lexical resources for Machine Translation (MT) and language processing systems, it is desirable to make the most of those resources already in existence. This paper describes the work being carried out on two MT projects that share a common goal: the creation, maintenance and reuse of lexical information. This goal calls into play a range of tasks from dictionary mining of machine-readable dictionaries (MRDs) to the definition of a repository capable of housing this diverse lexical information. This paper outlines the two efforts, focusing on the problems encountered and the intermediate results achieved. While the ultimate goal of the automated processing of on-line resources into multi-purpose lexical repositories is far from being achieved, our experience has shown that there are significant applications that can make use of the partially processed information produced en route. We will describe our experience with two projects, with a focus on one which utilized multiple lexical resources to provide the basis for two natural language processing (NLP) tools: a segmenter and a glosser for Thai. Finally, we make recommendations for future resource development, with a view toward mitigating the difficulties of merging information from diverse sources.
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A Multi-Neuro Tagger Using Variable Lengths of Contexts
Susann LuperFoy
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Dan Loehr
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David Duff
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Keith Miller
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Florence Reeder
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Lisa Harper
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Qing Ma
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Hitoshi Isahara
36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Volume 2
1997
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The use of pegs computational discourse framework as an interlingua representation
Susann Luperfoy
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Keith Miller
AMTA/SIG-IL First Workshop on Interlinguas