This is the first attempt of empirical investigation of language mediated concept activation (LMCA) in bilingual memory as a cognitive mechanism facilitating divergent thinking. Russian-English bilingual and Russian monolingual college students were tested on a battery of tests including among others Abbreviated Torrance Tests for Adults assessing divergent thinking traits and translingual prim...

Current search systems fail to satisfy users when the relevant information is written in a foreign language; when the user is not aware of the relevant -perhaps specialized terminology for a given topic; or when the user need is fuzzy and requires assisted search once inside an appropriate web portal. This paper describes an interactive multilingual search system that alleviates such limitation...

Today, more and more companies are facing an over-abundance of questions from their customers who now use an electronic medium to communicate rather than a more traditional medium such as mail or telephone. In this paper, we discuss the use of techniques developed in the area of question-answering to improve customer service management by responding automatically to customer questions. We justi...

We live in a translingual society, in order to communicate with people from different parts of the world we need to have an expertise in their respective languages. Learning all these languages is not at all possible; therefore we need a mechanism which can do this task for us. Machine translators have emerged as a tool which can perform this task. In order to develop a machine translator we ne...

Along with the growing need for intercultural and translingual communication in an increasingly globalized world, machine translation (MT) becomes more and more important both in assisting language professionals in their daily work and in helping non-professionals understand and create texts in foreign languages. Based on the frequent assumption that it is machine translation's aim to replace h...

In this year's Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE), the University of Maryland participated in the Ad-hoc task cross-language document retrieval task, with English queries and Hindi documents. The experiments focused on evaluating the effectiveness of a “meaning matching” approach based on translation probabilities. The FIRE Hindi test collection provides the first opportunity to ...

The Mormon Lit Blitz contest has tapped into a rich reservoir of short-short fiction, reaching milestone this year with the publication its first anthology. With 1000-word limit, final winners selected by popular vote, and special rounds for translated translingual work, yielded panorama diverse results during decade. Co-founder James Goldberg answers Dialogue's fiction editor Jennifer Quist's ...

This paper proposes a novel approach towards a videorealistic, speech-driven talking face for Cantonese. We present a technique that realizes a talking face for a target language (Cantonese) using only audio-visual facial recordings for a base language (English). Given a Cantonese speech input, we first use a Cantonese speech recognizer to generate a Cantonese syllable transcription. Then we ma...