Multilingual corpora are valuable resources for cross-language information retrieval and are available in many language pairs. However the Persian language does not have rich multilingual resources due to some of its special features and difficulties in constructing the corpora. In this study, we build a Persian-English comparable corpus from two independent news collections: BBC News in Englis...

Translating from English, a morphologically poor language, into morphologically rich languages such as Persian comes with many challenges. In this paper, we present an approach to rich morphology prediction using a parallel corpus. We focus on the verb conjugation as the most important and problematic phenomenon in the context of morphology in Persian. We define a set of linguistic features usi...

Automatic transformation of paper documents into electronic documents requires document segmentation at the first stage. However, some parameters restrictions such as variations in character font sizes, different text line spacing, and also not uniform document layout structures altogether have made it difficult to design a general-purpose document layout analysis algorithm for many years. Thus...

The pressure to produce work in English and to publish internationally has increased over recent years. However, a large number of non-native writers may be excluded from the web of global scholarship due to defective rhetorical organizations and discourse structures of their works. This study aimed to investigate frequency and distribution of transition markers (TMs) in introduction sections o...

In this paper we describe the development of a doctor-patient dialogue corpus to support a speech-to-speech machine translation effort for English-Persian medical dialogues. The corpus was developed by recording and transcribing English-to-English dialogues between medical students and standardized patients (actors who have been trained to portray illness or injury victims), and then translated...

Word Sense Disambiguation has long been a central problem in computational linguistics. Word Sense Disambiguation is the ability to identify the meaning of words in context in a computational manner. Statistical and supervised approaches require a large amount of labeled resources as training datasets. In contradistinction to English, the Persian language has neither any semantically tagged cor...

In statistical machine translation, data sparsity is a challenging problem especially for languages with rich morphology and inconsistent orthography, such as Persian. We show that orthographic preprocessing and morphological segmentation of Persian verbs in particular improves the translation quality of Persian-English by 1.9 BLEU points on a blind test set.

This study is an attempt to carry out a comparative analysis using Natural Semantic Metalanguage (henceforth NSM). The offering routine patterns of native Persian speakers was compared with that of Native American English speakers to see if it can provide evidence for applicability of NSM model which is claimed to be universal. The descriptive technique was the cultural scripts approach, using ...

In this paper, an automatic method for Persian WordNet construction based on Prenceton WordNet 2.1 (PWN) is introduced. The proposed approach uses Persian and English corpora as well as a bilingual dictionary in order to make a mapping between PWN synsets and Persian words. Our method calculates a score for each candidate synset of a given Persian word and for each of its translation, it select...