Gregor Thurmair - Böcker

This book presents all components and knowledge sources required for Transparent Information Retrieval. Depending on the respective topic and taking care of their interoperability, both deep and shallow technology is used. The processing starts from the analysis of the text data and collects its results in a multilingual conceptual network, this way enabling Transparent Information Retrieval where users communicate with the system in their native language while the documents could be in a different language, transparent to the users. To do so, the author investigates all text analysis components required for multilingual indexing, starting from preparatory work like language and topic identification, continuing with sentence splitting and tokenization (including Chinese), and describing lexical analysis, also for multiword entries and Named Entities. Entries are then disambiguated both on syntactic (by a tagger) and semantic level (by multilingual word sense disambiguation). The analysis results are collected in a dynamic multilingual ConceptNet, which is an index structure extended by monolingual relations (like synonyms, or head-modifier links) as well as multilingual ones (translations). In addition to many European languages also Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese are treated. The book concludes with a description of components needed to build the required resources, like crawlers, bilingual term extraction, and tools for defaulting linguistic annotations. For each component, readers will find a technology overview, a discussion of its main challenges in computational treatment, a description of the technical solution selected, and evaluation information.

This volume presents the results of a project supported by the European Commission, which demonstrated that it is possible to specify and build working machine-assisted translation and documentation systems to support professional translators and technical writers. This report on the project covers the following issues: elicitation and assessment of user needs; text import and conversion from different systems; remote access to term bases and translation systems; specification of record format for data banks; use of spelling, grammar and style checkers; usability of translation memories; and evaluation of machine-assisted translation systems.