A general purpose text corpus meant for linguists and lexicographers needs to satify quality criteria at at least four different levels. The first two criteria are fairly well established; the corpus should have a wide variety of texts and be tagged according to a fine-grained system. The last two criteria are much less widely appreciated, unfortunately. One has to do with variety of search cri...

Since the 50’s there have been many attempts to design computer programs which are able to translate texts from one natural language into another. Despite 40 years of intensive research the systems developed so far are still far from being able to translate texts correctly. In this thesis we present a different approach to the machine generation of texts into several languages, namely their gen...

Many programs have named configuration options. If users misunderstand what an option does, or type the name wrong, the program will malfunction. These malfunctions are configuration errors and often result in error messages. Even when an error message is uniquely caused by a particular problem, it may not tell the user how to proceed. Bad error messages are a major problem in configuration deb...

Recommender systems are a recent but increasingly widely used resource. Yet most, if not all of them suffer from serious deficiencies. Recommender systems often require first time users to enter ratings for a large number of items — a tedious process that often deters users. Thus, this thesis investigated whether useful recommendations could be made without requiring users to explicitly rate it...