[Corpora-List] Microsoft patents verb conjugations

[Antonio Branco]

Peter Adolphs wrote:
> sciubba at uniroma3.it wrote:
> As Alexandre Rafalovitch already wrote, the "major claim left is the
> cross-translation from the base language into the target language before
> conjugation". So, as I understand it, the described system is at the end
> a mere combination of an inflection system, a translation dictionary, a
> spell-checker, and a display for inflectional paradigms, all of which
> have been implemented in software before, either as single components or
> combinations. Although the proposed combination of all those components
> seems obvious and trivial to me, I haven't yet found such a software by

In order to showcase some of the NLP tools we developed
in our group, we established a free online service offering
conjugation and lemmatization facilities.

This service can be started as a conjugator at:

http://lxconjugator.di.fc.ul.pt

to obtain a conjugation table with inflected verb forms,
which by a simple click, can then be individually lemmatized.

In alternative, this service can also be started as a morphological
analyzer (lemmatizer + featurizer) at:

http://lxlemmatizer.di.fc.ul.pt

to obtain a list of admissible lemmas (possible neologisms included)
and associated inflectional features, which by a simple click,
can then be individually conjugated. Additionally, they can also
be translated into English.

This service has been permanently available since its first version
went online, and its was largely announced in several emailing
lists. It was announced there as a language learning tool, as a service
to help Portuguese speakers with one of the most difficult aspects of
Portuguese grammar, in particular for those that are learning it
as a second language (but also difficult for high school Portuguese
speaking kids learning grammar and grammatical terminology).

This system already caught the interest of the teachers,
and a thorough presentation of it is invited as a plenary
talk at the forthcoming Annual Meeting of the Association
of Teachers of Portuguese.

It is thus with surprise that we are coming across this discussion
thread in the corpora list about patenting something that taking
into account what's in http://tinyurl.com/e5g7y
and the several comments aired in this thread, we can't help
ourselves of wondering if it isn't a system similar to the one above.

If that's the case, we hope this message can be of help.

Best,

António Branco
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http://nlxgroup.di.fc.ul.pt