In this paper, we test the METIS-II MT system, from Dutch to English, under several experimental conditions: a verbatim condition in which word by word dictionary translations are used, a condition in which the effect of adding a target language corpus lookup is measured, and the effect of adding a few transfer rules to this. The results indicate that the addition of transfer rules clearly impr...

Learning from clinical experience (whether during formal research or in the course of patient care) is impeded by mainly two processes: bias and chance. Medical research results many times become inconclusive because some bias is detected after the results are available. A dictionary definition of ‘bias’ is ‘a onesided inclination of the mind. In statistics, ‘bias’ is ‘systematic error’ that ca...

In this paper we address the issue of the encoding of information on metaphors in a WordNet-like database, i.e. the Italian wordnet in EuroWordNet (ItalWordNet). When analysing corpus data we find a huge number of metaphoric expressions which can be hardly dealt with by using as reference database ItalWordNet. In particular, we have compared information contained both in dictionaries of Italian...

The paper presents activities to improve the quality of a rule-based MT system, using corpus information. If focuses on the area of dictionary, and shows how, and to which extent, corpus-based information can improve the system quality in the different areas of dictionary development. It deals with two main sources of errors: missing entries / translations, and wrong selections of one out of se...

Just over one decade ago, corpus-based pragmatics labelling made its way into a major dictionary for the first time. In the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary (COBUILD 2, Sinclair 1995), the compilers started to insert the novel 'PRAGMATICS' sign into the Extra Column, whenever the 'statement of meaning' for certain senses of words had to be supplemented by an 'added meaning'. In the latest edi...

This paper investigates the treatment of antonymy in Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary (2003) in order to find out what kinds of headwords are provided with antonyms as part of their definitions and also discusses the principles for antonym inclusion in the entries. CCALED includes canonical antonyms such as good/bad and dead/alive, as well as more contextually restricted pa...

Information valuable words are the strings with the significant deviation of real frequency from the expected one. The expected frequency is determined through the maximum entropy principle of the reconstructed (extended) frequency dictionary of strings composed from the shorter words. The information valuable words are found to be the complementary palindromes: they are read equally in opposit...

This quantitative study examines vowel adaptation patterns in English-based Standard Mandarin (SM) loanwords drawn from a dictionary corpus. The findings are: (i) English non-central vowels are mostly matched in backness in SM, (ii) English high and low vowels have a strong tendency to be retained as high and low respectively in SM, whereas matches for English mid vowels mostly vary between mid...

Reference sites play an increasingly important role in learning processes. Teachers use these sites in order to identify topics that should be covered by a course or a lecture. Learners visit online encyclopedias and dictionaries to find alternative explanations of concepts, to learn more about a topic, or to better understand the context of a concept. Ideally, a course or lecture should cover ...

We present an algorithm that acquires words (pairings of phonological forms and semantic representations) from larger utterances of unsegmented phoneme sequences and semantic representations. The algorithm maintains from utterance to utterance only a single coherent dictionary, and learns in the presence of homonymy, synonymy, and noise. Test results over a corpus of utterances generated from t...