Proper names represent about 10% of English or French newspaper articles. Their quantity and informational quality is already used in different Information Extraction systems. Proper names have widely been studied in the MUC conferences designed to promote research in Information Extraction. We have created our own named entity extraction tool based on a linguistic description with automata. Th...

This paper describes an experiment on the identification of frozen sentences (or verbal idioms) from European Portuguese on large corpus of journalistic text. It aims at identifying the main difficulties (or shortcomings) resulting from the intersection of linguistic information encoded in the lexicongrammar with finite-state transducers that are then applied to texts. The paper shows that, for...

In this paper, we use the term academic text to refer to any free text composed in an academic setting, covering the whole spectrum from first year students’ reviews of available scientific texts up to a scientist’s struggling, but still fragile text concerning his or her new discoveries. These academic texts can be processed by various information technologies. We can now outline the landscape...

The present quasi-experimental study mainly investigates the role of literature as input for reading comprehension in Iranian EFL classrooms. To be more exact, it investigates the effects of authentic and simplified literary texts on the reading comprehension of Iranian advanced EFL learners. The participants were 35 male and female Iranian EFL learners who were at advanced level, studying in a...

This paper describes an experiment whose goal was to introduce MT via postediting to a third-year university class in French-to-English translation. Even though most of the students in our French programs do not go on to become professional translators, it seemed a worthy objective to give them at least a taste of the challenges and opportunites which MT offers today, given how widespread it ha...

We describe work in progress on the development of a full syntactic parser for Romanian. This work is part of a larger project of multilingual extension of the Fips parser (Wehrli, 2007), already available for French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, and Greek, to four new languages (Romanian, Romansh, Russian and Japanese). The Romanian version was built by starting with the Fips generic par...

This paper describes a methodology for automatically identifying proverbs and their variants in running texts. This methodology is based on existing compilations of proverbs, by exploring the regular syntactic structures that most proverbs present and intersecting syntactic structure with the lexical units of the proverbs. From the syntactic regularities we divided the data into 13 different cl...