This paper presents the PORTULAN CLARIN Research Infrastructure for the Science and Technology of Language, which is part of the European research infrastructure CLARIN ERIC as its Portuguese national node, and belongs to the Portuguese National Roadmap of Research Infrastructures of Strategic Relevance. It encompasses a repository, where resources and metadata are deposited for long-term archiving and access, and a workbench, where Language Technology tools and applications are made available through different modes of interaction, among many other services. It is an asset of utmost importance for the technological development of natural languages and for their preparation for the digital age, contributing to ensure the citizenship of their speakers in the information society.

We describe the European Language Resource Infrastructure (ELRI), a decentralised network to help collect, prepare and share language resources. The infrastructure was developed within a project co-funded by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, and has been deployed in the four Member States participating in the project, namely France, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. ELRI provides sustainable and flexible means to collect and share language resources via National Relay Stations, to which members of public institutions can freely subscribe. The infrastructure includes fully automated data processing engines to facilitate the preparation, sharing and wider reuse of useful language resources that can help optimise human and automated translation services in the European Union.

n this paper, we introduce a new type of shared task — which is collaborative rather than competitive — designed to support and fosterthe reproduction of research results. We also describe the first event running such a novel challenge, present the results obtained, discussthe lessons learned and ponder on future undertakings.

We defend that bilingual lexicons automatically extracted from parallel corpora, whose entries have been meanwhile validated by linguists and classified as correct or incorrect, should constitute a specific parallel corpora. And, in this paper, we propose to use word-to-word translations to learn morph-units (comprising of bilingual stems and suffixes) from those bilingual lexicons for two language pairs L1-L2 and L1-L3 to induce a bilingual lexicon for the language pair L2-L3, apart from also learning morph-units for this other language pair. The applicability of bilingual morph-units in L1-L2 and L1-L3 is examined from the perspective of pivot-based lexicon induction for language pair L2-L3 with L1 as bridge. While the lexicon is derived by transitivity, the correspondences are identified based on previously learnt bilingual stems and suffixes rather than surface translation forms. The induced pairs are validated using a binary classifier trained on morphological and similarity-based features using an existing, automatically acquired, manually validated bilingual translation lexicon for language pair L2-L3. In this paper, we discuss the use of English (EN)-French (FR) and English (EN)-Portuguese (PT) lexicon of word-to-word translations in generating word-to-word translations for the language pair FR-PT with EN as pivot language. Generated translations are filtered out first using an SVM-based FR-PT classifier and then are manually validated.

In this paper, we introduce a coverage-based scoring function that discriminates between parallel and non-parallel sentences. When plugged into Bleualign, a state-of-the-art sentence aligner, our function improves both precision and recall of alignments over the originally proposed BLEU score. Furthermore, since our scoring function uses Moses phrase tables directly we avoid the need to translate the texts to be aligned, which is time-consuming and a potential source of alignment errors.

Although it is commonly assumed that word sense disambiguation (WSD) should help to improve lexical choice and improve the quality of machine translation systems, how to successfully integrate word senses into such systems remains an unanswered question. Some successful approaches have involved reformulating either WSD or the word senses it produces, but work on using traditional word senses to improve machine translation have met with limited success. In this paper, we build upon previous work that experimented on including word senses as contextual features in maxent-based translation models. Training on a large, open-domain corpus (Europarl), we demonstrate that this aproach yields significant improvements in machine translation from English to Portuguese.