This paper presents an overview of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), which is currently the dominant approach in Machine Translation (MT) research. In Way and Hearne (2010), we describe how central linguists and translators are to the MT process, so that SMT developers and researchers may better understand how to include these groups in continuing to advance the stateof-the-art. If these c...

Spoken and written languages, despite their different nature and function in human society, have often been in conflicts rather than in harmony for centuries. Despite the incessant efforts made by phoneticians, linguists, speech therapists and more recently speech technologists to describe the interrelations and relative merits of written and spoken languages, the written language still enjoys ...

The article considers authors' prefaces in linguistic popular science texts. Authors of texts about the language may have different professional status relation to subject speech (linguistics). Based on this criterion, three types authors been identified: 1) linguists who are active scientific work; 2) linguists-popularizers; 3) whose activities related practice (translators, editors, writers, ...

The phenomena of tense and aspect have long been of interest to linguists and philosophers. Linguists have tried to describe their interesting morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties in the various languages of the world, while philosophers have tried to characterize formally their truth conditions. (For some recent collections of papers, the reader is referred to Tedeschi and Zaenen ...

We investigate the controversial issue about the upper bound of interjudge agreement in the use of a low-level grammatical representation. Pessimistic views suggest that several percent of words in running text are undecidable in terms of part-of-speech categories. Our experiments with 55kW data give reason for optimism: linguists with only 30 hours' training apply the EngCG-2 morphological tag...

For languages with inflectional morphology, development of a morphological parser can be a bottleneck to further development. We focus on two difficulties: first, finding people with expertise in both computer programming and the linguistics of a particular language, and second, the short lifetime of software such as parsers. We describe a methodology to split parser building into two tasks: de...

In this position paper, we argue that although the data-driven, empirical paradigm for computational linguistics seems to be the best way forward at the moment, a thorough grounding in descriptive linguistics is still needed to do competent work in the field. Examples are given of how knowledge of linguistic phenomena leads to understanding the limitations of particular statistical models and t...

I discuss three common practices that obfuscate or invalidate the statistical analysis of randomized controlled interventions in applied linguistics. These are (a) checking whether randomization produced groups that are balanced on a number of possibly relevant covariates, (b) using repeated measures ANOVA to analyze pretest-posttest designs, and (c) using traditional significance tests to anal...