Krzysztof Czuba

Answering what-is questions by Virtual Annotation

We present the technique of Virtual Annotation as a specialization of Predictive Annotation for answering definitional What is questions. These questions generally have the property that the type of the answer is not given away by the question, which poses problems for a system which has to select answer strings from suggested passages. Virtual Annotation uses a combination of knowledge-based techniques using an ontology, and statistical techniques using a large corpus to achieve high precision.

Challenges in Adapting an Interlingua for Bidirectional English-Italian Translation

We describe our experience in adapting an existing high-quality, interlingual, unidirectional machine translation system to a new domain and bidirectional translation for a new language pair (English and Italian). We focus on the interlingua design changes which were necessary to achieve high quality output in view of the language mismatches between English and Italian. The representation we propose contains features that are interpreted differently, depending on the translation direction. This decision simplified the process of creating the interlingua for individual sentences, and allows the system to defer mapping of language-specific features (such as tense and aspect), which are realized when the target syntactic feature structure is created. We also describe a set of problems we encountered in translating modal verbs, and discuss the representation of modality in our interlingua.