In 1975, Searle stated that one should speak idiomatically unless there is some good reason not to do so. Fillmore, Kay, and O’Connor in 1988 defined an idiomatic expression or construction as something that a language user could fail to know while knowing everything else in the language. Our language is rich in conversational phrases, idioms, metaphors, and general expressions used in metaphorical meaning. These idiomatic expressions pose a particular challenge for Machine Translation (MT), because their translation for the most part does not work literally, but logically. The present book shows how idiomatic expressions can be recognized and correctly translated with the help of a bilingual idiom dictionary (English-German), a monolingual (German) corpus, and morphosyntactic rules. The work focuses on the field of Example-based Machine Translation (EBMT). A theory of idiomatic expressions with their syntactic and semantic properties is provided, followed by the practical part of the book which describes how the hybrid EBMT system METIS-II is able to correctly process idiomatic expressions. A comparison of METIS-II with three commercial systems shows that idioms are not impossible to translate as it was predicted in 1952: “The only way for a machine to treat idioms is—not to have idioms!” This book furnishes plenty of examples of idiomatic phrases and provides the foundation for how MT systems can process and translate idioms by means of simple linguistic resources.

Recent Advances in Example-Based Machine Translation is of relevance to researchers and program developers in the field of Machine Translation and especially Example-Based Machine Translation, bilingual text processing and cross-linguistic information retrieval. It is also of interest to translation technologists and localisation professionals. Recent Advances in Example-Based Machine Translation fills a void, because it is the first book to tackle the issue of EBMT in depth. It gives a state-of-the-art overview of EBMT techniques and provides a coherent structure in which all aspects of EBMT are embedded. Its contributions are written by long-standing researchers in the field of MT in general, and EBMT in particular. This book can be used in graduate-level courses in machine translation and statistical NLP.

Bringing together disciplines such as news translation, media studies, linguistics and financial discourse, this book addresses the issue of English-Greek idiom translation in the news press. It adopts a novel idiom-typology which draws its main concepts from psychology and gives a detailed description of the idiom-translation strategies employed in the Greek financial press. More specifically, this book explores the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic changes that idioms undergo when they are translated and proposes possible parameters that license a particular idiom-translation strategy to be used in preference to another. It is suggested that the four major tendencies dominant in idiom translation, namely idiom adherence, literalization, deletion and compensation, are determined by syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, cognitive and textual parameters. On these grounds, a new idiom-translation model is presented where it is assumed that idiom translation is genre-sensitive, thus pointing to the context-sensitive nature of idiom translation expected to influence the translation quality of genres.

​This book is an excellent introduction to multiword expressions. It provides a unique, comprehensive and up-to-date overview of this exciting topic in computational linguistics. The first part describes the diversity and richness of multiword expressions, including many examples in several languages. These constructions are not only complex and arbitrary, but also much more frequent than one would guess, making them a real nightmare for natural language processing applications. The second part introduces a new generic framework for automatic acquisition of multiword expressions from texts. Furthermore, it describes the accompanying free software tool, the mwetoolkit, which comes in handy when looking for expressions in texts (regardless of the language). Evaluation is greatly emphasized, underlining the fact that results depend on parameters like corpus size, language, MWE type, etc. The last part contains solid experimental results and evaluates the mwetoolkit, demonstrating its usefulness for computer-assisted lexicography and machine translation. This is the first book to cover the whole pipeline of multiword expression acquisition in a single volume. It is addresses the needs of students and researchers in computational and theoretical linguistics, cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence and computer science. Its good balance between computational and linguistic views make it the perfect starting point for anyone interested in multiword expressions, language and text processing in general.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Text, Speech, and Dialogue, TSD 2023, held in Pilsen, Czech Republic, during September 4–6, 2023. The 31 full papers presented together with the abstracts of 3 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The conference attracts researchers not only from Central and Eastern Europe but also from other parts of the world. One of its goals has always been bringing together NLP researchers with various interests from different parts of the world and promoting their cooperation. One of the ambitions of the conference is, not only to deal with dialogue systems but also to improve dialogue among researchers in areas of NLP, i.e., among the “text” and the “speech” and the “dialogue” people.

This Festschrift volume is published in Honor of Yaacov Choueka on the occasion of this 75th birthday. The present three-volumes liber amicorum, several years in gestation, honours this outstanding Israeli computer scientist and is dedicated to him and to his scientific endeavours. Yaacov's research has had a major impact not only within the walls of academia, but also in the daily life of lay users of such technology that originated from his research. An especially amazing aspect of the temporal span of his scholarly work is that half a century after his influential research from the early 1960s, a project in which he is currently involved is proving to be a sensation, as will become apparent from what follows. Yaacov Choueka began his research career in the theory of computer science, dealing with basic questions regarding the relation between mathematical logic and automata theory. From formal languages, Yaacov moved to natural languages. He was a founder of natural-language processing in Israel, developing numerous tools for Hebrew. He is best known for his primary role, together with Aviezri Fraenkel, in the development of the Responsa Project, one of the earliest fulltext retrieval systems in the world. More recently, he has headed the Friedberg Genizah Project, which is bringing the treasures of the Cairo Genizah into the Digital Age. This third part of the three-volume set covers a range of topics related to language, ranging from linguistics to applications of computation to language, using linguistic tools. The papers are grouped in topical sections on: natural language processing; representing the lexicon; and neologisation.

Yorick Wilks is a central figure in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. This book celebrates Wilks’s career from the perspective of his peers in original chapters each of which analyses an aspect of his work and links it to current thinking in that area. This volume forms a two-part set together with Words and Intelligence I: Selected Works by Yorick Wilks, by the same editors.

This book is a pioneering attempt to explore the relationships between technology and the humanities through case studies and specific contexts in the areas of language, theatre, literature, translation, philosophy, music, home designations, learning environment, and artificial intelligence. Written by scholars and specialists across various fields, the chapters explore the emerging field of techno-humanities. This book examines the development of language and society by means of Big Data, how technology is integrated into the theatres of Hong Kong and the ensuing results of such integration. The authors also highlight how technology is able to analyse, understand, and visualise literary works and to bring drastic changes to translation in the past seven decades. Long-standing philosophical issues are re-examined, linkages between technology and theoretical concepts are illuminated, and the emotional aspects of computational applications are investigated. This book also delves into insightful case studies such as providing suggestions to train novice translators through corpus-assisted translation teaching, analysing patterns of housing names, and discovering a new online method to acknowledge acquisition through authentic learning experiences. Overall, this book serves as a point of departure for us to go deeper into the role of technology in transforming the humanities in this digital age. This is a useful read for students and scholars interested in learning more about the cross section between humanities and technology.

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