11th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora

 

 

INVITED SPEAKERS

Kyo Kageura

Cross-lingual Correspondences of Terms in Texts and Terminologies: Theoretical Issues and Practical Implications

Terms are items in language that represent concepts. This relation of representation does not change through use. As such, terms have a unique status in language, second only to proper names. Due to this, clarifying the identity of concepts represented by terms becomes an important issue at the level of what is represented, and control of terms representing the same concept also becomes an important issue at the level of representation. These problems with which terminologists are concerned, though not clear at first glance, are in fact relevant to general words and vocabulary to a lesser extent. In this paper I first clarify theoretical issues of terms and terminologies and what they imply for terminology processing in particular and lexical and lexicological processing in general. I then pick up some terminological applications, examine their status and suggest a few issues that can be addressed in terminology processing.

Yves Lepage

Quasi-Parallel Corpora: Hallucinating Translations for the Chinese–Japanese Language Pair

We show how to address the problem of bilingual data scarcity in machine translation. We propose a method that generates aligned sentences which may be not perfect translations. It consists in ‘hallucinating’ new sentences which contain small but well-attested variations extracted from unaligned unrelated monolingual data. We conducted various experiments in statistical machine translation between Chinese and Japanese to determine when adding such quasi-parallel data to a basic training corpus leads to increases in translation accuracy as measured by BLEU.