The speech-to-speech translation system Verbmobil requires a multilingual setting. This consists of recognition engines in the three languages German, English and Japanese that run in one common framework together with a language identification component which is able to switch between these recognizers. This article describes the challenges of multilingual speech recognition and presents different solutions to the problem of the automatic language identification task. The combination of the described components results in a flexible and user-friendly multilingual spoken dialog system.

Given the lack of word delimiters in written Japanese, word segmentation is generally considered a crucial first step in processing Japanese texts. Typical Japanese segmentation algorithms rely either on a lexicon and grammar or on pre-segmented data. In contrast, we introduce a novel statistical method utilizing unsegmented training data, with performance on kanji sequences comparable to and sometimes surpassing that of morphological analyzers over a variety of error metrics.

The OPUS corpus is a growing collection of translated documents collected from the internet. The current version contains about 30 million words in 60 languages. The entire corpus is sentence aligned and it also contains linguistic markup for certain languages. 1.

Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are in different languages, has of late become one of the major topics within the information retrieval community. This paper

Abstract. The exploration of social networks is essential to find capable cooperators who can help problem-solving and to augment cooperation between workers in an organization. This paper describes PeCo-Mediator-II to seek for capable cooperators throuth a chain of personal connections (PeCo) in a networked organization. Moreover, this system helps to gather, explore, and visualize social networks in an organization. The experimental results show that the system facilitates users ’ encounters with cooperators and develops new helpful connections with the cooperators. Key words: Personal connections, on-line social networks, collaborative help networks, mediation, and software agents. Abbreviations: PeCo – Personal Connection 1.

With the worldwide growth of the Internet, research on Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) is being paid much attention. Existing CLIR approaches based on query translation require parallel corpora or comparable corpora for the disambiguation of translated query terms. However, those natural language resources are not readily available. In this paper, we propose a disambiguation method for dictionary-based query translation that is independent of the availability of such scarce language resources, while achieving adequate retrieval effectiveness by utilizing Web documents as a corpus and using co-occurrence information between terms within that corpus. In the experiments, our method achieved 97% of manual translation case in terms of the average precision.

This paper proposes a Japanese/English crosslanguage information retrieval (CLIR) system targeting technical documents. Our system first translates a given query containing technical terms into the target language, and then retrieves documents relevant to the translated query. The translation of technical terms is still problematic in that technical terms are often compound words, and thus new terms can be progressively created simply by combining existing base words. In addition, Japanese often represents loanwords based on its phonogram. Consequently, existing dictionaries find it difficult to achieve sufficient coverage. To counter the first problem, we use a compound word translation method, which uses a bilin- gual dictionary for base words and collocational statistics to resolve translation ambiguity. For the second problem, we propose a transliteration method, which identifies phonetic equivalents in the target language. We also show the effectiveness of our system using a test collec- tion for CLIR.

Abstract. Speech recognition has of late become a practical technology for real world applications. Aiming at speech-driven text retrieval, which facilitates retrieving information with spoken queries, we propose a method to integrate speech recognition and retrieval methods. Since users speak contents related to a target collection, we adapt statistical language models used for speech recognition based on the target collection, so as to improve both the recognition and retrieval accuracy. Experiments using existing test collections combined with dictated queries showed the effectiveness of our method. 1

The exploration of social networks is essential to find capable collaborators who can help problem-solving and to augment cooperation between users. This paper describes PeCo-Mediator-II for seeking for a collaborator with the chain of personal connections (PeCo) in distributed organizations. Moreover, this system helps gathering, exploring, and visualizing social networks. The experimental results show that the system facilitates that learners encounter collaborators and develop a new helpful relationship beyond the classroom. Keywords: Collaborative learning, personal connections, on-line social networks, collaborative help networks, mediation, and software agents.

Abstract. Establishing the semantic web on a large scale implies the widespread annotation