Parsimonious translation models for information retrieval

In the KL divergence framework, the extended language modeling approach has a critical problem of estimating a query model, which is the probabilistic model that encodes the user’s information need. For query expansion in initial retrieval, the translation model had been proposed to involve term co-occurrence statistics. However, the translation model was difficult to apply, because the term co-occurrence statistics must be constructed in the offline time. Especially in a large collection, constructing such a large matrix of term co-occurrences statistics prohibitively increases time and space complexity. In addition, reliable retrieval performance cannot be guaranteed because the translation model may comprise noisy non-topical terms in documents. To resolve these problems, this paper investigates an effective method to construct co-occurrence statistics and eliminate noisy terms by employing a parsimonious translation model. The parsimonious translation model is a compact version of a translation model that can reduce the number of terms containing non-zero probabilities by eliminating non-topical terms in documents. Through experimentation on seven different test collections, we show that the query model estimated from the parsimonious translation model significantly outperforms not only the baseline language modeling, but also the non-parsimonious models.     

他山之石,可以攻玉--论现代科学技术在翻译课程教学中的应用

20世纪末以来,随着现代科学技术的日益广泛应用,翻译课程教学也被注入了新的活力.与传统的教学模式相比,使用了现代科学技术的翻译课程在交流媒介、上课内容和沟通方式上都发生了巨大的变化.虽然以电脑为代表的现代科技有其不足,但教师还是应该积极利用新的科技成果,为自己的翻译课程教学服务.     

Building parallel corpora by automatic title alignment using length-based and text-based approaches

Cross-lingual semantic interoperability has drawn significant attention in recent digital library and World Wide Web research as the information in languages other than English has grown exponentially. Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) across different European languages, such as English, Spanish, and French, has been widely explored; however, CLIR across European languages and Oriental languages is still in the initial stage. To cross language boundary, corpus-based approach is promising to overcome the limitation of the knowledge-based and controlled vocabulary approaches but collecting parallel corpora between European language and Oriental language is not an easy task. Length-based and text-based approaches are two major approaches to align parallel documents. In this paper, we investigate several techniques using these approaches and compare their performances in aligning English and Chinese titles of parallel documents available on the Web.     

An empirical study of query expansion and cluster-based retrieval in language modeling approach

The term mismatch problem in information retrieval is a critical problem, and several techniques have been developed, such as query expansion, cluster-based retrieval and dimensionality reduction to resolve this issue. Of these techniques, this paper performs an empirical study on query expansion and cluster-based retrieval. We examine the effect of using parsimony in query expansion and the effect of clustering algorithms in cluster-based retrieval. In addition, query expansion and cluster-based retrieval are compared, and their combinations are evaluated in terms of retrieval performance by performing experimentations on seven test collections of NTCIR and TREC.     

文化趋同对英汉翻译的影响分析

文化趋同是文化发展的必然趋势。文化趋同增加了英汉两种语言的共同成分,在一定程度上影响了两种语言中民族物质化、民族意识化、民族地域化和民族社会化的翻译。     

析语言翻译的语境顺应性

翻译问题不单单是语言的问题,在很大程度上,它受到语境的影响与制约。语境顺应性是人类语言的特征。翻译活动不仅是语言文字的转换活动,更是不同文化的交流和移植活动;翻译所涉及的不仅仅是两种语言,更涉及两种文化。     

从语言观的变迁看翻译研究

在"语言反映存在"的认识基础上产生的翻译观基本都是寻求译文与原文的对等,而后期人们对于语言的本质展开了更为深入的讨论,"语言就是存在",而不再是人认识世界的理性工具,传统理论中原文与译文的关系遭到了颠覆,人们开始怀疑语言是否有确定的指称,是否能在译语中实现对等,是否能完全理解文本原意。     

汉英语言中“黑色”的文化差异及翻译

汉英语言中存在着巨大的文化差异,其中颜色词的差异很容易导致人们理解的误区。本文着重研究了汉英语言中＂黑色＂的文化差异及翻译的问题,力求更好地促进民族间语言和文化的交流。     

话语结构与汉藏翻译

文章认为结构对应的实质是以基本语法为依托、句型为参照的逻辑结构对应,只有保持逻辑结构的对应,才能对语义对应和语形对应提供保障性。作者还从汉藏翻译实践探讨了汉藏翻译中语义、语形、乃至语用的对应性问题。     

从及物性理论看古诗《春晓》的翻译

本文从语言学的角度出发,运用Halliday的系统功能语法理论,对《春晓》原文及其六种译文进行经验纯理功能的及物性分析,探讨古诗英译的得失,并检验功能语法在翻译研究方面的可行性和客观性。