The Construction of the Multilingual Internet: Unicode,Hebrew, and Globalization

This paper examines the technologies that enable the representation of Hebrew on websites. Hebrew is written from right to left and in non‐Latin characters, issues shared by a number of languages which seem to be converging on a shared solution—Unicode. Regarding the case of Hebrew, I show how competing solutions have given way to one dominant technology. I link processes in the Israeli context with broader questions about the ‘multilingual Internet,’ asking whether the commonly accepted solution for representing non‐Latin texts on computer screens is an instance of cultural imperialism and convergence around a western artifact. It is argued that while minority languages are given an online voice by Unicode, the context is still one of western power.     

Initial Development Towards a Trilingual Speech Interface for Financial Information Inquiries

This paper describes our initial effort in developing a trilingual speech interface for financial information inquiries. Our foreign exchange inquiry system consists of: (i) monolingual and trilingual speech recognizers, which receive the user's spoken input in the form of microphone speech; (ii) a real-time data capture component which continuously updates a relational database from a financial data satellite feed; and (iii) a trilingual speech generation component, which generates English and Chinese text based on the raw financial data. The generated text is then transformed into spoken presentations. English text is processed by the FESTIVAL synthesizer system. Chinese text is sent to our syllable-based synthesizer, which employs a concatenative resequencing technique to produce spoken presentations in Putonghua or Cantonese. The speech interface is augmented with a visual display which aims to provide feedback to the user at all times during an interaction. Within the restricted scope of foreign exchange (FOREX), our recognition performance accuracies remain above 93%. Confusions across languages contributed significantly to our recognition errors, but most are confusions between the same currency/country names spoken in different languages. These errors are not detrimental with respect to data retrieval. Our concatenative re-sequencing technique reports the date, time and exchange rates of the input currency pair. A demonstration can be found at http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/hccl/demos/.     

多语言在线机器翻译研究

描述了通过使用外部知识库和基于短语的翻译模型,利用多线程、任务分发的技术实现了一个在线的、高性能的多语言翻译引擎,已初步实现了维汉、哈汉、柯汉三种语言间的翻译。翻译引擎很容易扩展到其他语言对,具有翻译词、短语、句子、文件和网页的功能。     

Applying EuroWordNet to Cross-Language Text Retrieval

We discuss ways in which EuroWordNet (EWN) can be used in multilingual information retrieval activities, focusing on two approaches to Cross-Language Text Retrieval that use the EWN database as a large-scale multilingual semantic resource. The first approach indexes documents and queries in terms of the EuroWordNet Inter-Lingual-Index, thus turning term weighting and query/document matching into language-independent tasks. The second describes how the information in the EWN database could be integrated with a corpus-based technique, thus allowing retrieval of domain-specific terms that may not be present in our multilingual database. Our objective is to show the potential of EuroWordNet as a promising alternative to existing approaches to Cross-Language Text Retrieval.     

基于IMM-IME输入法接口的实现方法

输入法管理器-输入法编辑器(IMM-IME)结构是Windows多语言支持的核心组件之一,为输入法的开发提供了强有力的支持。该文介绍了IMM-IME的构成部件、工作原理及输入法编辑器的具体实现步骤。并结合开发实际,论述了通用输入法接口的概念和实现原则。     

Multilingual Document Production From Support for Translating to Support for Authoring

In this paper, we look at the current scenario in multilingual documentation generation and the types of tools currently being used in support of the translation task, and discuss their shortcomings. We examine emergent trends in the document industry, observing a reorganisation of the workflow which mirrors a shift of attention from translating to authoring and from the ergonomics of post-editing the target text to the ergonomics of producing the source text. We argue that these trends invite the design and development of new tools for the task of producing multilingual texts, and that multilingual generation provides the appropriate technology, shifting attention to an even earlier stage in the authoring process, that of specifying the semantics of the text to be produced. We describe a prototype system which exploits this technology to meet the expressed needs of authors and translators by supporting them in the drafting of multilingual instructions. We suggest that, in the future, a single platform to support multilingual documentation should integrate translation-oriented tools and generation-based tools to be employed as appropriate by different types of users (translators and authors) in different circumstances.     

Introduction to EuroWordNet

This paper gives a global introduction to the aims and objectives of the EuroWordNet project, and it provides a general framework for the other papers in this volume. EuroWordNet is an EC project that develops a multilingual database with wordnets in several European languages, structured along the same lines as the Princeton WordNet. Each wordnet represents an autonomous structure of language-specific lexicalizations, which are interconnected via an Inter-Lingual-Index. The wordnets are built at different sites from existing resources, starting from a shared level of basic concepts and extended top-down. The results will be publicly available and will be tested in cross-language information retrieval applications.     

MulTran多语言机器翻译系统实现的语言学基础

MulTran是一个以实用化为目标的多语言机器翻译系统。该系统的特点是以一个统一的翻译处理程序控制运行四个语言翻译系统。该系统的技术核心是多功能逻辑运算分析技术,该技术的实现是靠建立一系列的功能函数,而这些功能函数是建立在诸如线性、离散性、递归性、层次性等自然语言的特性的基础之上的。     

一种多语言机制英语在线翻译辅助系统

文中通过对以词组为本的统计式机器翻译系统(Statistical machine translation system,SMT)进行词对应方法的优化和筛选来建立多语言机制的英语在线翻译辅助系统.通过M1模型来计算平行语料库中语言字与字之间可能的配对几率,以EM演算法求取未知资料状况下的参数最大值.通过设置条件值参数作为...