Language Preservation

September 1, 2010

My colleagues (Jim Cowie and Steve Helmreich of New Mexico State University) and I just submitted a paper titled “Language Preservation: A case study in collecting and digitizing machine-tractable language data” to the Chicago Colloquium. The abstract is:

In this paper we describe a process for collecting and digitizing machine-tractable resources for lesser-studied languages. We illustrate this process by using examples from the Paraguayan indigenous language Guarani, and Uighur, a Altaic Turkic language spoken in the Xinjiang province of China. By ‘machine-tractable’  we mean that in addition to being readable by people, the resource can also be processed by a computational tool. Our goal in acquiring these resources is to use them for quick ramp-up machine translation. These resources are also useful to scholars who are studying these particular languages. >>

Paper accepted to the journal topiCS

August 20, 2010

Jeanette Gundel (University of Minnesota), Nancy Hedberg (Simon Fraser University) and I just had our paper, Underspecification of Cognitive Status in Reference Production: Some Empirical Predictions, accepted for publication in the Cognitive Science Society journal, Topics in Cognitive Science. To quote Nancy: “Hallelujia!!! … I am ecstatic!!!” That mirrors my feelings. I am grateful to the reviewers for their wonderful comments. Now there is a moderate amount of work to do to address the reviewers’ comments. Here is the abstract. >>

My research mentioned in novel

August 5, 2010

For over 20 years I have been collaborating with Jeanette Gundel and Nancy Hedberg on research focusing on referring expressions. As part of this research we propose something we term the Givenness Hieararchy–a set of cognitive statuses the are on an implicational scale. Oddly enough this research is mentioned in the  just-published novel Starting from Scratch by Susan Gilbert-Collins. >>

Submitted paper to topiCS

March 5, 2010

Jeanette Gundel (University of Minnesota), Nancy Hedberg (Simon Fraser University) and I just submitted a paper to the new journal topiCS (topics in Cognitive Science). This pretty much consumed my entire spring break. The title of the paper is Underspecification of Cognitive Status in Reference Production: Some Empirical Predictions. Here’s the abstract. >>

Arabic Localization

December 26, 2009

Over the Christmas break I have been looking at words in Standard Arabic that are more common in one region compared to another. This is a continuation of work I have been doing with Ahmed Abdelali and Steve Helmreich. Ahmed has collected a corpus of Standard Arabic texts from newspapers in Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Syria, and the UK. In previous work we looked at distinguishing texts from different regions using the frequency of common words (the equivalent of common English words such as at, on,and  in).  In this work over Christmas break, I was looking for the difference in the frequency of content words (similar to Amazon’s ’statistically improbably phrases’)–words that occur in texts more frequently than you would expect by chance. >>

Delivered paper at the Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages workshop

August 28, 2009

I presented the paper Investigations on standard Arabic geographical classification at theComputational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages workshop. Immediately before my talk, I convinced myself that the paper was not related to the conference topic and that it was simplistic. However, it seems that it was well received. >>

Paper accepted to Arabic Script Languages Workshop

July 23, 2009

I am grateful that the paper Ahmed Abdelali, Steve Helmreich, and I worked on was accepted at the Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages workshop to be held August 26th in Ottawa (workshop program). I would also like to thank to the three reviewers for their helpful comments. Here is the conclusion. >>

Paper submitted to the Arabic Script-based Languages Workshop

May 21, 2009

Ahmed Abdelali, Steve Helmreich and I just submitted a paper to CAASL3: Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages to be held in Ottawa on August 26th. It reports on work we have done on geographical classification of Arabic text. We presented a paper on this topic at the Chicago Colloquia on Digital Humanities and Computer Science back in November 2008 (Linguistic Dumpster Diving: Geographical Classification of Arabic Text – pdf). At that colloqiua a number of people gave us good suggestions and criticisms. Our work since then has included investigating the suggestions these people made and also addressing the criticisms. For example, one individual suggested we look at non-linear methods of classification. >>

Paper submitted to the Machine Translation Summit

April 30, 2009

As I mentioned in previous posts, I developed (with tremendous help from Adam Zacharski) a cross-language instant messaging system using Adobe Flex. This system provides concurrent real-time translation for instant messaging using multiple machine translation engines. During this last academic year, Bill Ogden, my colleague in New Mexico, and several people in his lab (Sieun An and Yuki Ishikawa) used this system to evaluate the performance of machine translation systems based on how effective they were in helping people accomplish shared tasks. They used paid participants who worked in pairs (one Japanese speaker paired with a native English speaker) to accomplish a photo identification task using this instant messaging system. We just submitted a paper describing the results of this work to the Machine Translation Summit in Ottawa in August.

Playing with the Stanford Log-linear Part-Of-Speech Tagger

March 4, 2009

I would like to create a part-of-speech tagger for Paraguayan Guarani. Initially I thought I would use the Brill part of speech tagger, but it seems to have vanished from the web. In my search, I ran across the Stanford Log-Linear Part-Of-Speech Tagger. It was developed by Chris Manning’s group and I figured anything developed by Chris Manning is probably exceptional.  I downloaded it and ran the included English part-of-speech tagger on a 250k text (a public domain Tom Swift book). >>