BACKGROUND Elderly migrants who do not speak the official language of their host country have increased due to extensive international migration, and will further increase in the future. This entails major challenges to ensure good communication and avoid communication barriers that can be overcome by the use of adequate interpreter services. To our knowledge, there are no previous investigatio...

We intend to reflect on the problems encountered and methods applied when trying to represent multilingual and culture-specific knowledge in a terminological database which is set up to provide multilingual input for ontology engineers. The database consists of terminological information referring to units of understanding in the domain of value added tax. This database could be one of the main...

With rapid growth of commercial search engines, detecting multilingual and multi-regional intent underlying search queries becomes a critical challenge to serve international users with diverse language and region requirements. We introduce a query intent probabilistic model, whose input is the number of clicks on documents from different regions and in different language, while the output of t...

In this paper, we present HeiNER, the multilingual Heidelberg Named Entity Resource. HeiNER contains 1,547,586 disambiguated English Named Entities together with translations and transliterations to 15 languages. Our work builds on the approach described in (Bunescu and Pasca, 2006), yet extends it to a multilingual dimension. Translating Named Entities into the various target languages is carr...

This paper describes multilingual technology projects currently being undertaken in conjunction with the NATO BICES (Battlefield Information Collection and Exploitation) organization. First, we describe the basis of the multilingual processing for these projects, the CyberTrans machine translation environment, an operational system that enables the use of machine translation (MT) by intelligenc...

This paper reviews the ethnic multilingual policies and practices in China in general and Yunnan in particular. It first introduces the demographic features and multilingual policies in Yunnan and then discusses the challenges of ethnic minority education in China from a critical perspective in terms of policy and curriculum. It is argued that it is necessary to re-conceptualize ethnic minority...

Topic modeling is a widely used approach to analyzing large text collections. A small number of multilingual topic models have recently been explored to discover latent topics among parallel or comparable documents, such as in Wikipedia. Other topic models that were originally proposed for structured data are also applicable to multilingual documents. Correspondence Latent Dirichlet Allocation ...

The paper addresses the problem of designing a speech recogniser for multilingual vocabularies. The goal of the research is twofold: future Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) systems, like a speech activated flight information service, are likely to require multilinguality as a major feature; besides, a general language-independent phonetic inventory might be very useful in bootstrapping phone...

This paper describes our recent work in developing multilingual conversational systems that support human-computer interactions. Our approach is based on the premise that a common semantic representation can be extracted from the input for all languages, at least within the context of restricted domains. In our design of such systems, language dependent information is separated from the system ...