Significant advances have been achieved in Speech-to-Speech (S2S) translation systems in recent years. However, rapid configuration of S2S systems for low-resource language pairs and domains remains a challenging problem due to lack of human translated bilingual training data. In this paper, we report on an effort to port our existing English/Iraqi S2S system to the English/Farsi language pair ...

Farsi, also known as Persian, is the official language of Iran and Tajikistan and one of the two main languages spoken in Afghanistan. Farsi enjoys a unified Arabic script as its writing system. In this paper we briefly introduce the writing standards of Farsi and highlight problems one would face when analyzing Farsi electronic texts, especially during development of Farsi corpora regarding to...

Farsi, also known as Persian, is the official language of Iran, Tajikistan and one of the two main languages spoken in Afghanistan. It is an Indo-European agglutinating language, written in Arabic script. This paper presents the first step in creating Farsi basic language resources kit. This Step comprises the specifications for morphosyntactic encoding, which is based on the EAGLES/MULTEXT mod...

Do the languages that people speak affect the way they think about musical pitch? Here we compared pitch representations in native speakers of Dutch and Farsi. Dutch speakers describe pitches as „high‟ (hoog) and „low‟ (laag), but Farsi speakers describe high-frequency pitches as „thin‟ (naazok) and low-frequency pitches as „thick‟ (koloft). Differences in language were reflected in differences...

Do people who speak different languages think differently, even when they are not using language? To find out, we used nonlinguistic psychophysical tasks to compare mental representations of musical pitch in native speakers of Dutch and Farsi. Dutch speakers describe pitches as high (hoog) or low (laag), whereas Farsi speakers describe pitches as thin (nazok) or thick (koloft). Differences in l...

We present our findings on projecting part of speech (POS) information from a well resourced language, Farsi, to help tag a lower resourced language, Pashto, following Feldman and Hana (2010). We make a series of modifications to both tag transition and lexical emission parameter files generated from a hidden Markov model tagger, TnT, trained on the source language (Farsi). Changes to the emiss...

The development of Language Engineering (LE) and Information Retrieval (IR) applications requires availability of sizeable, reliable and representative corpora. This paper describes how we have constructed a well-structured 345 MB tagged corpus of news, and presents some beneficial statistics of this corpus based upon the characteristics of Farsi language. It also goes into particular detail on...

Statistical machine translation (SMT) suffers from various problems which are exacerbated where training data is in short supply. In this paper we address the data sparsity problem in the Farsi (Persian) language and introduce a new parallel corpus, TEP++. Compared to previous results the new dataset is more efficient for Farsi SMT engines and yields better output. In our experiments using TEP+...

The present study aims at the description and analysis of the phonological and lexical development of a child who is acquiring Farsi as his first language. The child's language production at the holophrastic stage of language development, mainly single words, is observed and recorded longitudinally for nearly seven months since he was 16 months old until he turned 23 months. An attempt is made ...