Stephen Helmreich


2006

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Parallel Syntactic Annotation of Multiple Languages
Owen Rambow | Bonnie Dorr | David Farwell | Rebecca Green | Nizar Habash | Stephen Helmreich | Eduard Hovy | Lori Levin | Keith J. Miller | Teruko Mitamura | Florence Reeder | Advaith Siddharthan
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)

This paper describes an effort to investigate the incrementally deepening development of an interlingua notation, validated by human annotation of texts in English plus six languages. We begin with deep syntactic annotation, and in this paper present a series of annotation manuals for six different languages at the deep-syntactic level of representation. Many syntactic differences between languages are removed in the proposed syntactic annotation, making them useful resources for multilingual NLP projects with semantic components.

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Pragmatics-based MT and the Translation of Puns
David Farwell | Stephen Helmreich
Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

2004

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Counting, measuring, ordering: translation problems and solutions
Stephen Helmreich | David Farwell
Proceedings of the 6th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers

This paper describes some difficulties associated with the translation of numbers (scalars) used for counting, measuring, or selecting items or properties. A set of problematic issues is described, and the presence of these difficulties is quantified by examining a set of texts and translations. An approach to a solution is suggested.

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Interlingual annotation for MT development
Florence Reeder | Bonnie Dorr | David Farwell | Nizar Habash | Stephen Helmreich | Eduard Hovy | Lori Levin | Teruko Mitamura | Keith Miller | Owen Rambow | Advaith Siddharthan
Proceedings of the 6th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers

MT systems that use only superficial representations, including the current generation of statistical MT systems, have been successful and useful. However, they will experience a plateau in quality, much like other “silver bullet” approaches to MT. We pursue work on the development of interlingual representations for use in symbolic or hybrid MT systems. In this paper, we describe the creation of an interlingua and the development of a corpus of semantically annotated text, to be validated in six languages and evaluated in several ways. We have established a distributed, well-functioning research methodology, designed a preliminary interlingua notation, created annotation manuals and tools, developed a test collection in six languages with associated English translations, annotated some 150 translations, and designed and applied various annotation metrics. We describe the data sets being annotated and the interlingual (IL) representation language which uses two ontologies and a systematic theta-role list. We present the annotation tools built and outline the annotation process. Following this, we describe our evaluation methodology and conclude with a summary of issues that have arisen.

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Interlingual Annotation of Multilingual Text Corpora
Stephen Helmreich | David Farwell | Bonnie Dorr | Nizar Habash | Lori Levin | Teruko Mitamura | Florence Reeder | Keith Miller | Eduard Hovy | Owen Rambow | Advaith Siddharthan
Proceedings of the Workshop Frontiers in Corpus Annotation at HLT-NAACL 2004

2003

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Pragmatics-based translation and MT evaluation
David Farwell | Stephen Helmreich
Workshop on Systemizing MT Evaluation

In this paper the authors wish to present a view of translation equivalence related to a pragmatics-based approach to machine translation. We will argue that current evaluation methods which assume that there is a predictable correspondence between language forms cannot adequately account for this view. We will then describe a method for objectively determining the relative equivalence of two texts. However, given the need for both an open world assumption and non-monotonic inferencing, such a method cannot be realistically implemented and therefore certain "classic" evaluation strategies will continue to be preferable as practical methods of evaluation.

2001

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Towards pragmatics-based machine translation
David Farwell | Stephen Helmreich
Workshop on MT2010: Towards a Road Map for MT

We propose a program of research which has as its goal establishing a framework and methodology for investigating the pragmatic aspects of the translation process and implementing a computational platform for carrying out systematic experiments on the pragmatics of translation. The program has four components. First, on the basis of a comparative study of multiple translations of the same document into a single target language, a pragmatics-based computational model is to be developed in which reasoning about the beliefs of the participants in the translation task and about the content of a text are central. Second, existing Natural Language Processing technologies are to be appraised as potential components of a computational platform that supports investigations into the effects of pragmatics on translation. Third, the platform is to be assembled and prototype translation systems implemented which conform to the pragmatics-based computational model of translation. Finally, a novel evaluation methodology is to be developed and evaluations of the systems carried out.

2000

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Text meaning representation as a basis for representation of text interpretation
Stephen Helmreich | David Farwell
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers

In this paper we propose a representation for what we have called an interpretation of a text. We base this representation on TMR (Text Meaning Representation), an interlingual representation developed for Machine Translation purposes. A TMR consists of a complex feature-value structure, with the feature names and filler values drawn from an ontology, in this case, ONTOS, developed concurrently with TMR. We suggest on the basis of previous work, that a representation of an interpretation of a text must build on a TMR structure for the text in several ways: (1) by the inclusion of additional required features and feature values (which may themselves be complex feature structures); (2) by pragmatically filling in empty slots in the TMR structure itself; and (3) by supporting the connections between feature values by including, as part of the TMR itself, the chains of inferencing that link various parts of the structure.

1997

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User-Friendly Machine Translation: Alternate Translations Based on Differing Beliefs
David Farwell | Stephen Helmreich
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit VI: Papers

In this paper the authors present a notion of “user-friendly” translation and describe a method for achieving it within a pragmatics-based approach to machine translation. The approach relies on modeling the beliefs of the participants in the translation process: the source language speaker and addressee, the translator and the target language addressee. Translation choices may vary according to how beliefs are ascribed to the various participants and, in particular, “user-friendly” choices are based on the beliefs ascribed to the TL addressee.

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Time to eat peaches: language-specific information in interlingua
Stephen Helmreich
AMTA/SIG-IL First Workshop on Interlinguas

1996

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Lexical Rules is Italicized
Stephen Helmreich | David Farwell
Breadth and Depth of Semantic Lexicons

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Translation differences and pragmatics-based MT
Stephen Helmreich | David Farwell
Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas

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Two principles and six techniques for rapid MT development
Sergei Nirenburg | Stephen Beale | Stephen Helmreich | Kavi Mahesh | Evelyne Viegas | Rémi Zajac
Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas

1991

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Non-Literal Word Sense Identification Through Semantic Network Path Schemata
Eric Iverson | Stephen Helmreich
29th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Interpretation without Semantics
Stephen Helmreich
Lexical Semantics and Knowledge Representation