The Spanish writing system has consistent grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPC), rendering it more transparent than English. We compared first-language (L1) orthographic transparency on how monolingual Englishand Spanish-readers learned a novel writing system with a 1:1 (LT) and a 1:2 (LO) GPC. Our dependent variables were learning time, decoding, and vocabulary. We found a main effect for ...

This paper reports ongoing experiments towards exploiting the use of images to provide additional context for statistical machine translation (SMT). We investigate whether this contextual information can be helpful in targeting two well-known challenges in machine translation: ambiguity (incorrect translation of words that have multiple senses) and out-of-vocabulary words (words left untranslat...

Statistical machine translation is often faced with the problem of having insufficient training data for many language pairs. In this thesis, several methods have been proposed to leverage other sources to enhance the quality of machine translation systems. Particularly, we propose approaches suitable in these four scenarios: 1. when an additional parallel corpus between the source and the targ...