Harold Somers

Also published as: H.L. Somers, Harold L. Somers


2010

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Mitigating Problems in Analogy-based EBMT with SMT and vice versa: A Case Study with Named Entity Transliteration
Sandipan Dandapat | Sara Morrissey | Sudip Kumar Naskar | Harold Somers
Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

2009

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Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation
Lluís Màrquez | Harold Somers
Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

2007

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Using free online MT in multilingual websites
Federico Gaspari | Harold Somers
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XI: Tutorials

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Theoretical and methodological issues regarding the use of language technologies for patients with limited English proficiency
Harold Somers
Proceedings of the 11th Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages: Papers

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Making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse: (mis)using online MT services as bilingual dictionaries
Federico Gaspari | Harold Somers
Proceedings of Translating and the Computer 29

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Medical spoken language translation: What do the users really need?
Harold Somers
Proceedings of Translating and the Computer 29

2006

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Developing Speech Synthesis for Under-Resourced Languages by “Faking it”: An Experiment with Somali
Harold Somers | Gareth Evans | Zeinab Mohamed
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)

Speech synthesis or text-to-speech (TTS) systems are currently available for a number of the world's major languages, but for thousands of other, unsupported, languages no such technology is available. While awaiting the development of such technology, we propose using an existing TTS system for a major language (the base language, BL) to "fake" TTS for an unsupported language (the target language, TL). This paper describes the factors which determine the choice of a suitable BL for a given TL, and describe an experiment with a fake Somali TTS system evaluated in the real-life situation of a doctor–patient dialogue. 28 Somali participants were asked to judge the comprehensibility of 25 short Somali sentences recorded with a German TTS system. Results suggest that "faking it" provides reasonable stop-gap TTS for unsupported languages.

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Language Engineering and the Pathway to Healthcare: A User-Oriented View
Harold Somers
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Medical Speech Translation

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Detecting Inappropriate Use of Free Online Machine Translation by Language Students. A Special Case of Plagiarism Detection
Harold Somers | Federico Gaspari | Ana Niño
Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

2005

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Faking it: Synthetic Text-to-speech Synthesis for Under-resourced Languages – Experimental Design
Harold Somers
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2005

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Round-trip Translation: What Is It Good For?
Harold Somers
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2005

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DEMOCRAT: Deciding between Multiple Outputs Created by Automatic Translation
Menno van Zaanen | Harold Somers
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit X: Papers

2004

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Latest challenges to MT R&D
Harold Somers
Proceedings of the 10th Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages

2003

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Computer-based Support for Patients with Limited English
Harold Somers | Hermione Lovel
Proceedings of the 7th International EAMT workshop on MT and other language technology tools, Improving MT through other language technology tools, Resource and tools for building MT at EACL 2003

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Evaluating commercial spoken language translation software
Harold Somers | Yuri Sugita
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit IX: Papers

While spoken language translation remains a research goal, a crude form of it is widely available commercially for Japanese–English as a pipeline concatenation of speech-to-text recognition (SR), text-to-text translation (MT) and text-to-speech synthesis (SS). This paper proposes and illustrates an evaluation methodology for this noisy channel which tries to quantify the relative amount of degradation in translation quality due to each of the contributing modules. A small pilot experiment involving word-accuracy rate for the SR, and a fidelity evaluation for the MT and SS modules is proposed in which subjects are asked to paraphrase translated and/or synthesised sentences from a tourist’s phrasebook. Results show (as expected) that MT is the “noisiest” channel, with SS contributing least noise. The concatenation of the three channels is worse than could be predicted from the performance of each as individual tasks.

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Prolog models of classical approaches to MT
Harold Somers
Workshop on Teaching Translation Technologies and Tools

This paper describes a number of “toy” MT systems written in Prolog, designed as programming exercises and illustrations of various approaches to MT. The systems include a dumb word-for-word system, DCG-based “transfer” system, an interlingua-based system with an LFG-like interface structure, a first-generation-like Russian-English system, an interactive system, and an implementation based on early example-based MT.

2002

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What are we celebrating today?
Harold Somers
Workshop on machine translation roadmap

2001

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EBMT seen as case-based reasoning
Harold Somers
Workshop on Example-Based machine Translation

This paper looks at EBMT from the perspective of the Case-based Reasoning (CBR) paradigm. We attempt to describe the task of machine translation (MT) seen as a potential application of CBR, and attempt to describe MT in standard CBR terms. The aim is to see if other applications of CBR can suggest better ways to approach EBMT.

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Three perspectives on MT in the classroom
Harold Somers
Workshop on Teaching Machine Translation

This paper considers the role of translation software, especially Machine Translation (MT), in curricula for students of computational linguistics, for trainee translators and for language learners. These three sets of students have differing needs and interests, although there is some overlap between them. A brief historical view of MT in the classroom is given, including comments on the author’s 25 years of experience in the field. This is followed by discussion and examples of strategies for teaching about MT and related aspects of Language Engineering and Information Technology for the three types of student.

2000

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Is MT software documentation appropriate for MT users?
David Mowatt | Harold Somers
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: User Studies

This paper discusses an informal methodology for evaluating Machine Translation software documentation with reference to a case study, in which a number of currently available MT packages are evaluated. Different types of documentation style are discussed, as well as different user profiles. It is found that documentation is often inadequate in identifying the level of linguistic background and knowledge necessary to use translation software, and in explaining technical (linguistic) terms needed to use the software effectively. In particular, the level of knowledge and training needed to use the software is often incompatible with the user profile implied by the documentation. Also, guidance on how to perform more complex tasks, which may be especially idiosyncratic, is often inadequate or missing altogether.

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Evaluating Machine Translation: the Cloze Procedure Revisited
Harold Somers | Elizabeth Wild
Proceedings of Translating and the Computer 22

1999

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Aligning Phonetic Segments for Children’s Articulation Assessment
Harold Somers
Computational Linguistics, Volume 25, Number 2, June 1999

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Sources of linguistic knowledge for minority languages
Harold L. Somers
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit VII

Language Engineering (LE) products and resources for the world’s “major” languages are steadily increasing, but there remains a major gap as regards less widely-used languages. This paper considers the current situation regarding LE resources for some of the languages in question, and some proposals for rectifying this situation are made, including techniques based on adapting existing resources and “knowledge extraction” techniques from machine-readable corpora.

1998

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Similarity Metrics for Aligning Children’s Articulation Data
Harold L. Somers
36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Volume 2

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Similarity metrics for aligning children’s articulation data
Harold L. Somers
COLING 1998 Volume 2: The 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

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An Attempt to Use Weighted Cusums to Identify Sublanguages
Harold Somers
New Methods in Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning

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Survey of methodological approaches to MT
Harold Somers
Proceedings of the Third Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Tutorial Descriptions

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Extracting Recurrent Phrases and Terms from Texts Using a Purely Statistical Method
Zhao-Ming Gao | Harold Somers
Proceedings of the 12th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

1997

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Machine Translation and Minority Languages
Harold Somers
Proceedings of Translating and the Computer 19

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Multilingual Generation and Summarization of Job Adverts: the TREE Project
Harold Somers | Bill Black | Joakim Nivre | Torbjorn Lager | Annarosa Multari | Luca Gilardoni | Jeremy Ellman | Alex Rogers
Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing

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The Current State of Machine Translation
Harold L. Somers
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit VI: Plenaries

This paper aims to survey the current state of research, development and use of Machine Translation (MT). Under ‘research’ the role of linguistics is discussed, and contrasted with research in ‘analogy- based’ MT. The range of languages covered by MT systems is discussed, and the lack of development for minority languages noted. The new research area of spoken language translation (SLT) is reviewed, with some major differences between SLT and text MT described. Under ‘use and users’ we discuss tools for users: Translation Memory, bilingual concordances and software to help checking for mistranslations. The use of MT on the World Wide Web is also discussed, regarding pre- and post-editing, the impact of ‘controlled language’ is reviewed, and finally a proposal is made that MT users can revise the input text in the light of errors that the system makes, thus ‘post-editing the source text’.

1995

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Problems with the second generation architecture and new trends in MT
Harold Somers
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit V

1994

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Book Reviews: English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation
Harold Somers
Computational Linguistics, Volume 20, Number 3, September 1994

1992

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Interactive multilingual text generation for a monolingual user
Harold Somers
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages

1991

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Machine Translation Seen as Interactive Multilingual Text Generation
Harold L. Somers | Danny Jones
Proceedings of Translating and the Computer 13: The theory and practice of machine translation – a marriage of convenience?

1990

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Machine Translation without a source text
Harold L. Somers | Jun-ichi Tsujii | Danny Jones
COLING 1990 Volume 3: Papers presented to the 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

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Book Reviews: From Syntax to Semantics: Insights from Machine Translation
Harold Somers
Computational Linguistics, Volume 16, Number 1, March 1990

1989

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Fourth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Harold Somers | Mary McGee Wood
Fourth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

1988

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Experiences With an On-Line Translating Dialogue System
Seiji Miike | Koichi Hasebe | Harold Somers | Shin-ya Amano
26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Book Reviews: Machine Translation: Theoretical and Methodological Issues
Harold Somers
Computational Linguistics Association, Formerly the American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 14, Number 1, Winter 1988

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Book Reviews: The Fifth Generation Fallacy: Why Japan is Betting Its Future on Artificial Intelligence
Harold Somers
Computational Linguistics, Volume 14, Number 4, December 1988, LFP: A Logic for Linguistic Descriptions and an Analysis of its Complexity

1987

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Book Reviews: Planning and Understanding: A Computational Approach to Human Reasoning
Harold Somers
Computational Linguistics, Formerly the American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 13, Numbers 1-2, January-June 1987

1986

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The need for MT-oriented versions of Case and Valency in MT
Harold L. Somers
Coling 1986 Volume 1: The 11th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

1983

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Investigating the Possibility of a Microprocessor-Based Machine Translatton System
Harold L. Somers
First Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing

1982

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BEDE: A Microprocessor-Based Machine Translation System
H.L. Somers | R.L. Johnson
Coling 1982 Abstracts: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Computational Linguistics Abstracts