Anna Sågvall Hein

The PLUG-project. Parallel Corpora in Linköping, Uppsala, Göteborg: Aims and Achievements

In this paper we present the aims and achievements of the PLUG project. It is a cooperative Swedish project focusing on the generation of translation data from sentence-aligned bitext with Swedish as the source or the target. A sentence-aligned quadrilingual corpus was established and used as a testbed. Two systems for word linking and contrastive lexical extraction were evaluated and improved with the aim of combining them into a common system. The common system will run as an application of a modular corpus tool also created in the project. The basic principles of the word linking systems are outlined and illustrative results are presented and discussed with regard to recall, precision, and application in example-based machine translation, enhanced machine translation, transfer-based machine translation and human translation. Further processing for these applications as well as integration issues remain to be explored. Finally, the extraction of syntactic translation data is an issue that remains to be approached. Focus will be set on verb valency with imperative and infinitive clauses as basic frames.

Eye Movement Study of Reading on a Mobile Device Using the Page and RSVP Text Presentation Formats

We present findings from a balanced repeated-measurement evaluation where 16 subjects read texts of similar length and difficulty using the traditional Page and the dynamic Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) format on a mobile device. Apart from monitoring reading speed, comprehension, and NASA-TLX task load, we also devised a system that enabled us to keep track of subjects eye movements. The results indicate no significant differences in reading speed or comprehension, but for task load, RSVP increased the Temporal task load factor. However, the most striking differences were found in the eye movement recordings. RSVP was found to decrease the overall number of eye movements significantly. But, RSVP was also found to significantly increase the number of regressions, although it decreased the number of saccades. These findings contradict common claims and their implications for the improvement of readability on mobile devices are discussed.

An experimental parser

Uppsala Chart Processor is a linguistic processor for phonological, morphological, and syntactic analysis. It incorporates the basic mechanisms of the General Syntactic Processor. Linguistic rules as well as dictionary articles are presented to the processor in a procedural formalism, the UCP-formalism. The control of the processing rests upon the grammar and the dictionaries. Special attention has been devoted to problems concerning the interplay between different kinds of linguistic processes.