The development of language technologies (LTs) such as machine translation, text analytics, and dialogue systems is essential in the current digital society, culture and economy. These LTs, widely supported in languages in high demand worldwide, such as English, are also necessary for smaller and less economically powerful languages, as they are a driving force in the democratization of the communities that use them due to their great social and cultural impact. As an example, dialogue systems allow us to communicate with machines in our own language; machine translation increases access to contents in different languages, thus facilitating intercultural relations; and text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems broaden different categories of users’ access to technology. In the case of Galician (co-official language, together with Spanish, in the autonomous region of Galicia, located in northwestern Spain), incorporating the language into state-of-the-art AI applications can not only significantly favor its prestige (a decisive factor in language normalization), but also guarantee citizens’ language rights, reduce social inequality, and narrow the digital divide. This is the main motivation behind the Nós Project (Proxecto Nós), which aims to have a significant contribution to the development of LTs in Galician (currently considered a low-resource language) by providing openly licensed resources, tools, and demonstrators in the area of intelligent technologies.

This article describes a compositional distributional method to generate contextualized senses of words and identify their appropriate translations in the target language using monolingual corpora. Word translation is modeled in the same way as contextualization of word meaning, but in a bilingual vector space. The contextualization of meaning is carried out by means of distributional composition within a structured vector space with syntactic dependencies, and the bilingual space is created by means of transfer rules and a bilingual dictionary. A phrase in the source language, consisting of a head and a dependent, is translated into the target language by selecting both the nearest neighbor of the head given the dependent, and the nearest neighbor of the dependent given the head. This process is expanded to larger phrases by means of incremental composition. Experiments were performed on English and Spanish monolingual corpora in order to translate phrasal verbs in context. A new bilingual data set to evaluate strategies aimed at translating phrasal verbs in restricted syntactic domains has been created and released.

The objective of this work is to quantify, with a simple and robust measure, the distance between historical varieties of a language. The measure will be inferred from text corpora corresponding to historical periods. Different approaches have been proposed for similar aims: Language Identification, Phylogenetics, Historical Linguistics or Dialectology. In our approach, we used a perplexity-based measure to calculate language distance between all the historical periods of a specific language: European Portuguese. Perplexity has also proven to be a robust metric to calculate distance between languages. However, this measure has not been tested yet to identify diachronic periods within the historical evolution of a specific language. For this purpose, a historical Portuguese corpus has been constructed from different open sources containing texts with close original spelling. The results of our experiments show that Portuguese keeps an important degree of homogeneity over time. We anticipate this metric to be a starting point to be applied to other languages.

This article describes the system submitted by the Citius_Ixa_Imaxin team to the VarDial 2017 (DSL and GDI tasks). The strategy underlying our system is based on a language distance computed by means of model perplexity. The best model configuration we have tested is a voting system making use of several n-grams models of both words and characters, even if word unigrams turned out to be a very competitive model with reasonable results in the tasks we have participated. An error analysis has been performed in which we identified many test examples with no linguistic evidences to distinguish among the variants.

This article describes the systems submitted by the Citius_Ixa_Imaxin team to the Discriminating Similar Languages Shared Task 2016. The systems are based on two different strategies: classification with ranked dictionaries and Naive Bayes classifiers. The results of the evaluation show that ranking dictionaries are more sound and stable across different domains while basic bayesian models perform reasonably well on in-domain datasets, but their performance drops when they are applied on out-of-domain texts.