Bradley Music

Design and evaluation of grammar checkers in multiple languages

This paper describes issues involved in the development of a grammar checker in multiple languages at Microsoft Corporation. Focus is on design (selecting and prioritizing error identification rules) and evaluation (determining product quality).

PaTrans: a patent translation system

This paper describes PaTrans-a fully automatic production MT system designed for producing raw translations of patent texts from English into Danish. First we describe the backbone of the system: the EUROTRA research project and prototype. Then we give an overview of the translation process and the basic functionality of PaTrans, and finally we describe some recent extensions for improving processing efficiency and the translation quality of unexpected input encountered in real-life texts.

Linguistic Interaction in Staging — a Language Engineering View

In the dialogue excerpt above, a bartender and a customer are negotiating the best drink for the customer to order. Besides this practical goal, however, the bartender is also attending to a different concern: he is trying to make the customer feel at ease — he is probably even flirting with her. This is reflected in the way his questions are phrased. The customer on the other hand is not very decisive, but shows in her replies that she trusts the bartender’s judgement. This dialogue, which has been constructed on the basis of a series of dialogues written for the Staging project by Niels Lehmann and his colleagues from the Institute of Dramaturgy at the University of Aarhus (Denmark), is a good example of the kind of linguistic interaction envisaged in Staging: the user and the agent engage in a conversation where the level of interpretation directly related to the task that has to be solved (making a decision about the drink to be ordered) is subordinate to the social character of the dialogue.