This paper describes the architecture, operation and results obtained with the Question Answering prototype for Spanish developed in the Department of Language Processing and Information Systems at the University of Alicante for CLEF-2004 Spanish monolingual QA evaluation task. Our system is based on the prototype developed for CLEF-2003 Spanish monolingual task [3]. This system has been enhanc...

We present an information theoretic objective for bilingual word clustering that incorporates both monolingual distributional evidence as well as cross-lingual evidence from parallel corpora to learn high quality word clusters jointly in any number of languages. The monolingual component of our objective is the average mutual information of clusters of adjacent words in each language, while the...

Bilingual children often outperform monolingual children in tasks of cognitive control. This advantage may be a consequence of the fact that bilinguals have more practice controlling attention due to an ongoing need to manage two languages. However, existing evidence is limited because possible differences in ethnicity and socioeconomic status have not been properly controlled. To address this ...

We present an approach to multilingual information retrieval that does not depend on the existence of specific linguistic resources such as stemmers or thesaurii. Using the HAIRCUT system we participated in the monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual tasks of the CLEF-2000 evaluation. Our method, based on combining the benefits of words and character n-grams, was effective for both language-in...

Our approach to cross-lingual document retrieval starts from the assumption that effective monolingual retrieval is at the core of any cross-language retrieval system. We devote particular attention to three crucial ingredients of our approach to cross-lingual retrieval. First, effective tokenization techniques are essential to cope with morphological variations common in many European language...

Targeted paraphrasing is a new approach to the problem of obtaining cost-effective, reasonable quality translation that makes use of simple and inexpensive human computations by monolingual speakers in combination with machine translation. The key insight behind the process is that it is possible to spot likely translation errors with only monolingual knowledge of the target language, and it is...

This paper discusses an approach to modeling monolingual and bilingual dictionaries in the description logic species of the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL DL). The central idea is that the model of a bilingual dictionary is a combination of the models of two monolingual dictionaries, in addition to an abstract translation model. The paper addresses the advantages of using OWL DL for the design ...

The study of bilingualism has often focused on two contradictory possibilities: that the learning of two languages may produce deficits of performance in each language by comparison with performance of monolingual individuals, or on the contrary, that the learning of two languages may produce linguistic or cognitive advantages with regard to the monolingual learning experience. The work reporte...

Statistical bilingual word alignment has been well studied in the context of machine translation. This paper adapts the bilingual word alignment algorithm to monolingual scenario to extract collocations from monolingual corpus. The monolingual corpus is first replicated to generate a parallel corpus, where each sentence pair consists of two identical sentences in the same language. Then the mon...

PURPOSE To compare the performance of phonological awareness skills in bilingual and monolingual students of both genders. METHODS This research presents an observational, cross-sectional descriptive study conducted with 17 students from the 3rd grade, aged between seven years and 8 years and 11 months, with similar socioeconomic level, from two private schools, being one a monolingual school...