23.1148, FYI: Free Ebook on CALL and MT Available

Wed Mar 7 16:57:32 UTC 2012

LINGUIST List: Vol-23-1148. Wed Mar 07 2012. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 23.1148, FYI: Free Ebook on CALL and MT Available

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Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:57:25
From: Ziyuan Yao [yaoziyuan at gmail.com]
Subject: Free Ebook on CALL and MT Available

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Free ebook available: Breaking the Language Barrier: A Game-
Changing Approach v0.18

Dear All,

I'm pleased to announce my free ebook ''Breaking the Language 
Barrier: A Game-Changing Approach'', version 0.18. The ebook has 
undergone significant updates since its initial release (version 0.09 in 
April 2010). Almost every part has significant new developments, so I 
suggest existing readers take it anew.

Perhaps nothing can explain this ebook better than its own Overview, 
which is attached below.

View or download it (free) from:

https://sites.google.com/site/yaoziyuan/publications/books/breaking-
the-language-barrier-a-game-changing-approach

Best Regards,

Ziyuan Yao
https://sites.google.com/site/yaoziyuan/

Overview

In today's world, the goal of breaking the language barrier is pursued 
on two fronts: language teachers teaching students a second 
language, thus enabling humans to manually break the language 
barrier, and computational linguists building increasingly better 
machine translation systems to automatically break the language 
barrier. 

However, I see important, unfulfilled opportunities on both fronts: 

In second language teaching, amazingly efficient teaching methods 
have not gone mainstream and not drawn enough attention from 
computational linguists (so that these methods could be automated and 
truly powerful). For example, imagine if you're browsing a Web page in 
your native language, and a Web browser extension automatically 
detects the topic of this page and inserts relevant foreign language 
micro-lessons in it, so that you can incidentally learn a foreign 
language while browsing interesting native language information :-) 
This AdSense-like ''L1-driven L2 teaching'' will be the future of second 
language teaching.

In machine translation, computational linguists only pay attention to 
computer capabilities to process natural language (known as natural 
language processing, NLP), and totally ignore human capabilities to 
share some burden from the computer in language processing, which 
can lead to significantly better results. For example, theory and 
practice have proven that syntax disambiguation is a much harder task 
than word sense disambiguation, and therefore machine translation 
tends to screw up the word order of the translation result if the 
language pair has disparate word orders; but what if machine 
translation preserves the source language's word order in the 
translation result, and teaches the end user about the source 
language's word order so that he can manually figure out the logic of 
the translation result? If the end user is willing to commit some of his 
own natural intelligence in the man-machine joint effort to break the 
language barrier, he will get the job done better.

Therefore this ebook presents emerging ideas and implementations in 
computer-assisted language learning (CALL), reading, writing and 
machine translation (MT) that strive to leverage both human and 
machine language processing potential and capabilities, and will 
redefine the way people break the language barrier.

Approaches whose titles have an exclamation mark (!) are stirring 
game-changing technologies which are the driving forces behind this 
initiative. 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Translation

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LINGUIST List: Vol-23-1148	
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