Computational Language Documentation attempts to make the most recent research in speech and language technologies available to linguists working on language preservation and documentation. In this paper, we pursue two main goals along these lines. The first is to improve upon a strong baseline for the unsupervised word discovery task on two very low-resource Bantu languages, taking advantage of the expertise of linguists on these particular languages. The second consists in exploring the Adaptor Grammar framework as a decision and prediction tool for linguists studying a new language. We experiment 162 grammar configurations for each language and show that using Adaptor Grammars for word segmentation enables us to test hypotheses about a language. Specializing a generic grammar with language specific knowledge leads to great improvements for the word discovery task, ultimately achieving a leap of about 30% token F-score from the results of a strong baseline.

In this paper we investigate the impact of the integration of context into dialogue translation. We present a new contextual parallel corpus of television subtitles and show how taking into account speaker gender can significantly improve machine translation quality in terms of B LEU and M ETEOR scores. We perform a manual analysis, which suggests that these improvements are not necessary related to the morphological consequences of speaker gender, but to more general linguistic divergences.

This paper documents the systems developed by LIMSI for the IWSLT 2014 speech translation task (English→French). The main objective of this participation was twofold: adapting different components of the ASR baseline system to the peculiarities of TED talks and improving the machine translation quality on the automatic speech recognition output data. For the latter task, various techniques have been considered: punctuation and number normalization, adaptation to ASR errors, as well as the use of structured output layer neural network models for speech data.

Arabic is a morphologically rich language, and Arabic texts abound of complex word forms built by concatenation of multiple subparts, corresponding for instance to prepositions, articles, roots prefixes, or suffixes. The development of Arabic Natural Language Processing applications, such as Machine Translation (MT) tools, thus requires some kind of morphological analysis. In this paper, we compare various strategies for performing such preprocessing, using generic machine learning techniques. The resulting tool is compared with two open domain alternatives in the context of a statistical MT task and is shown to be faster than its competitors, with no significant difference in MT quality.

The explicit introduction of morphosyntactic information into statistical machine translation approaches is receiving an important focus of attention. The current freely available Part of Speech (POS) taggers for the French language are based on a limited tagset which does not account for some flectional particularities. Moreover, there is a lack of a unified framework of training and evaluation for these kinds of linguistic resources. Therefore in this paper, three standard POS taggers (Treetagger, Brill’s tagger and the standard HMM POS tagger) are trained and evaluated in the same conditions on the French MULTITAG corpus. This POS-tagged corpus provides a tagset richer than the usual ones, including gender and number distinctions, for example. Experimental results show significant differences of performance between the taggers. According to the tagging accuracy estimated with a tagset of 300 items, taggers may be ranked as follows: Treetagger (95.7%), Brill’s tagger (94.6%), HMM tagger (93.4%). Examples of translation outputs illustrate how considering gender and number distinctions in the POS tagset can be relevant.

La traduction automatique statistique par séquences de mots est une voie prometteuse. Nous présentons dans cet article deux évolutions complémentaires. La première permet une modélisation de la langue cible dans un espace continu. La seconde intègre des catégories morpho-syntaxiques aux unités manipulées par le modèle de traduction. Ces deux approches sont évaluées sur la tâche Tc-Star. Les résultats les plus intéressants sont obtenus par la combinaison de ces deux méthodes.

The aim of the Media-Evalda project is to evaluate the understanding capabilities of dialog systems. This paper presents the Media protocol for speech understanding evaluation and describes the results of the June 2005 literal evaluation campaign. Five systems, both symbolic or corpus-based, participated to the evaluation which is based on a common semantic representation. Different scorings have been performed on the system results. The understanding error rate, for the Full scoring is, depending on the systems, from 29% to 41.3%. A diagnosis analysis of these results is proposed.

The aim of the MEDIA project is to design and test a methodology for the evaluat ion of context-dependent and independent spoken dialogue systems. We propose an evaluation paradigm based on the use of test suites from real-world corpora and a common semantic representation and common metrics. This paradigm should allow us to diagnose the context-sensitive understanding capability of dialogue system s. This paradigm will be used within an evaluation campaign involving several si tes all of which will carry out the task of querying information from a database .