This paper describes an attempt to recycle parts of the Czech-to-Russian machine translation system (MT) in the new Czech-to-English MT system. The paper describes the overall architecture of the new system and the details of the modules which have been added. A special attention is paid to the problem of named entity recognition and to the method of automatic acquisition of lexico-syntactic information for the bilingual dictionary of the system.

The multilingual machine translation system described in the first part of this paper demonstrates that the translation memory (TM) can be used in a creative way for making the translation process more automatic (in a way which in fact does not depend on the languages used). The MT system is based upon exploitation of syntactic similarities between more or less related natural languages. It currently covers the translation from Czech to Slovak, Polish and Lithuanian. The second part of the paper also shows that one of the most popular TM based commercial systems, TRADOS, can be used not only for the translation itself, but also for a relatively fast and natural method of evaluation of the translation quality of MT systems.

In this paper we introduce a class of formal grammars with special measures capable to describe typical syntactic inconsistencies in free word order languages. By means of these measures it is possible to characterize more precisely the problems connected with the task of building a robust parser or a grammar checker of Czech.

This paper describes current results achieved during the work on parsing of a free-word-order natural language (Czech) . It contains theoretical base for a new class of grammars - CFG extended for dependecies and non-projectivities – and also the description of the implementation of a parser and grammar-checker. The paper also describes some typical problems of parsing of free-word-order languages and their solutions (or discusssion of those problems), which are still subject of investigation. The implementation described here serves currently as a testing tool for the development of a large scale grammar of Czech. Some of the quantitative data from a processing of test sentences are also included.

The paper develops further the idea of using the notion of the stock of shared knowledge (SSK) for anaphora resolution following a more subtle treatment of the influence of the topic/focus articulation of the sentence on the degrees of salience of items of the SSK. An algorithmic evaluation procedure of the SSK is formulated taking into account the notions of contextual boundness, syntactic associations, complexity of the sentences and existence/nonexistence of possible competitors, and a general evaluating function is proposed, essential for the process of anaphora resolution. In the present paper the analysis is performed for Czech; however, the considerations are claimed to be of a universal validity, the actual relations between different factors and the values, of course, being language-dependent.

The hierarchy of salience of the items of the knowledge assumed by the speaker to be shared by him and by the hearer constitutes one aspect of a dynamic account of discourse (Sect. 1). It is claimed that a representation of this hierarchy is a good support for discourse analysis (reference assignement , Sect. 2) and for discourse production (pronominalization, definite description, Sect. 3).