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<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=656555114-10112006><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2>Hello All</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=656555114-10112006><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2>those of us who deal with speech might be also interested
to know that there are different American and British audio tracks on movies on
DVD. (There is a version of Zorro with Anthony Hopkins, and I was wondering
whether he did both versions.) I have no idea whether the differences are only
in pronunciation or perhaps also lexical and other ones. </FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=656555114-10112006><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2>However, that means there is quite a lot of material
waiting to be described.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=656555114-10112006><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2>Best wishes</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=656555114-10112006><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2>Tadeusz Piotrowski</FONT></SPAN></DIV><BR>
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<FONT face=Tahoma size=2><B>From:</B> owner-corpora@lists.uib.no
[mailto:owner-corpora@lists.uib.no] <B>On Behalf Of </B>Ramesh
Krishnamurthy<BR><B>Sent:</B> Friday, November 10, 2006 3:46 PM<BR><B>To:</B>
Merle Tenney; Mark P. Line; CORPORA@UIB.NO<BR><B>Subject:</B> Re:
[Corpora-List] Parallel corpora and word alignment, WAS: American and British
English spelling converter<BR></FONT><BR></DIV>
<DIV></DIV>Hi Merle<BR>I must admit I hadn't been thinking of "parallel"
corpora along such strict-definition lines.<BR><BR>So who is creating large
amounts of 'parallel' data (in the technical/translation sense)<BR>for British
English and American English? I wouldn't have thought there was a very large
<BR>market....?<BR><BR>Noah Smith mentioned Harry Potter, and I must admit I'm
quite surprised to discover <BR>that publishers are making such changes as<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=cite cite="" type="cite"> They had drawn for
the house cup<BR> They had tied for the house
cup</BLOCKQUOTE>Perhaps because it's "children's" literature? Or at least read
by many children, <BR>who may not be willing/able to cross varietal boundaries
with total comfort.<BR><BR>But when I read a novel by an American author, I
accept that it's part of my role as reader to <BR>take on board any varietal
differences as part of the context. I can't imagine anyone wanting<BR>to
translate it into British English for my benefit, and I suspect I would hate
to read the resulting <BR>text...<BR><BR>Best<BR>Ramesh<BR><BR><BR>At 18:53
09/11/2006, Merle Tenney wrote:<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=cite cite="" type="cite">Ramesh Krishnamurthy
wrote:<BR>> <BR>> ...and there is no obvious parallel corpus of Br-Am
Eng to consult...<BR>> Do you know of one by any chance...<BR>>
<BR>> And Mark P. Line responded:<BR>> <BR>>Why would it have to be
a *parallel* corpus?<BR> <BR>In a word, alignment. The formative
work in parallel corpora has come from the machine translation crowd,
especially the statistical machine researchers. The primary purpose of
having a parallel corpus is to align translationally equivalent documents in
two languages, first at the sentence level, then at the word and phrase
level, in order to establish word and phrase equivalences. A secondary
purpose, deriving from the sentence-level alignment, is to produce source
and target sentence pairs to prime the pump for translation memory
systems.<BR> <BR>Like you, I have wondered why you couldn't study two
text corpora of similar but not equivalent texts and compare them in their
totality. Of course you can, but is there any way in this scenario to
come up with meaningful term-level comparisons, as good as you can get with
parallel corpora? I can see two ways you might
proceed:<BR> <BR>The first method largely begs the question of term
equivalence. You begin with a set of known related words and you
compare their frequencies and distributions. So if you are studying
language models, you compare <I>sheer</I>, <I>complete</I>, and <I>utter
</I>as a group. If you are studying dialect differences, you study
<I>diaper</I> and <I>nappy</I> or <I>bonnet</I> and <I>hood</I> (clothing
and automotive). If you are studying translation equivalence in
English and Spanish, you study <I>flag</I>, <I>banner</I>, <I>standard</I>,
<I>pendant</I> alongside <I>bandera</I>, <I>estandarte</I>, <I>pabellón</I>
(and <I>flag</I>, <I>flagstone</I> vs. <I>losa</I>, <I>lancha</I>;
<I>flag</I>, <I>fail,</I> <I>languish</I>, <I>weaken</I> vs.
<I>flaquear</I>, <I>debilitarse</I>, <I>languidecer</I>; etc.). The
point is, you already have your comparable sets going in, and you study
their usage across a broad corpus. One problem here is that you need
to have a strong word sense disambiguation component or you need to work
with a word sense-tagged corpus to deal with homophonous and polysemous
terms like <I>sheer</I>, <I>bonnet</I>, <I>flat</I>, and <I>flag, </I>so you
still have some hard work left even if you start with the related word
groups.<BR> <BR>The second method does not begin, a priori, with sets
of related words. In fact, generating synonyms, dialectal variants,
and translation equivalents is one of its more interesting challenges.
Detailed lexical, collocational, and syntactic characterizations is
another. Again, this is much easier to do if you are working with
parallel corpora. If you are dealing with large, nonparallel texts,
this is a real challenge. Other than inflected and lemmatized word
forms, there are a few more hooks that can be applied, including POS tagging
and WSD. Even if both of these technologies perform well, however,
that is still not enough to get you to the quality of data that you get with
parallel corpora.<BR> <BR>Mark, if you can figure out a way to combine
the quality and quantity of data from a very large corpus with the alignment
and equivalence power of a parallel corpus without actually having a
parallel corpus, I will personally nominate you for the Nobel Prize in
Corpus Linguistics. J<BR> <BR>Merle<BR> <BR>PS and Shameless
Microsoft Plug: In the last paragraph, I accidentally typed “figure
out a why to combine” and I got the blue squiggle from Word 2007, which was
released to manufacturing on Monday of this week. It suggested
<I>way</I>, and of course I took the suggestion. I am amazed at the
number of mistakes that the contextual speller has caught in my writing
since I started using it. I recommend the new version of Word and
Office for this feature alone. J</BLOCKQUOTE><X-SIGSEP>
<P></X-SIGSEP>Ramesh Krishnamurthy<BR><BR>Lecturer in English Studies, School
of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET,
UK<BR>[Room NX08, North Wing of Main Building] ; Tel: +44 (0)121-204-3812 ;
Fax: +44 (0)121-204-3766<BR><A
href="http://www.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr.jsp"
eudora="autourl">http://www.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr.jsp<BR><BR></A>Project
Leader, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network): <A href="http://corpus.aston.ac.uk/"
eudora="autourl">http://corpus.aston.ac.uk/</A> </P></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>