The quality of Machine Translation (MT) can often be poor due to it appearing incoherent and lacking in fluency. These problems consist of word ordering, awkward use of words and grammar, and translating text too literally. However we should not consider translations such as these failures until we have done our best to enhance their quality, or more simply, their fluency. In the same way various processes can be applied to touch up a photograph, various processes can also be applied to touch up a translation. This research outlines the improvement of MT quality through the application of Fluency Enhancement (FE), which is a process we have created that reforms and evaluates text to enhance its fluency. We have tested our FE process on our own MT system which operates on what we call the SAM fundamentals, which are as follows: Simplicity - to be simple in design in order to be portable across different languages pairs, Adaptability - to compensate for the evolution of language, and Multiplicity - to determine a final set of translations from as many candidate translations as possible. Based on our research, the SAM fundamentals are the key to developing a successful MT system, and are what have piloted the success of our FE process.

The quality of Machine Translation (MT) can often be poor due to it appearing incoherent and lacking in fluency. These problems consist of word ordering, awkward use of words and grammar, and translating text too literally. However we should not consider translations such as these failures until we have done our best to enhance their quality, or more simply, their fluency. In the same way various processes can be applied to touch up a photograph, various processes can also be applied to touch up a translation. This research outlines the improvement of MT quality through the application of Fluency Enhancement (FE), which is a process we have created that reforms and evaluates text to enhance its fluency. We have tested our FE process on our own MT system which operates on what we call the SAM fundamentals, which are as follows: Simplicity - to be simple in design in order to be portable across different languages pairs, Adaptability - to compensate for the evolution of language, and Multiplicity - to determine a final set of translations from as many candidate translations as possible. Based on our research, the SAM fundamentals are the key to developing a successful MT system, and are what have piloted the success of our FE process.

The treatment of multiword expressions (MWEs), like take off, bus stop and big deal, is a challenge for NLP applications. This kind of linguistic construction is not only arbitrary but also much more frequent than one would initially guess. This thesis investigates the behaviour of MWEs across different languages, domains and construction types, proposing and evaluating an integrated methodological framework for their acquisition. There have been many theoretical proposals to define, characterise and classify MWEs. We adopt generic definition stating that MWEs are word combinations which must be treated as a unit at some level of linguistic processing. They present a variable degree of institutionalisation, arbitrariness, heterogeneity and limited syntactic and semantic variability. There has been much research on automatic MWE acquisition in the recent decades, and the state of the art covers a large number of techniques and languages. Other tasks involving MWEs, namely disambiguation, interpretation, representation and applications, have received less emphasis in the field. The first main contribution of this thesis is the proposal of an original methodological framework for automatic MWE acquisition from monolingual corpora. This framework is generic, language independent, integrated and contains a freely available implementation, the mwetoolkit. It is composed of independent modules which may themselves use multiple techniques to solve a specific sub-task in MWE acquisition. The evaluation of MWE acquisition is modelled using four independent axes. We underline that the evaluation results depend on parameters of the acquisition context, e.g., nature and size of corpora, language and type of MWE, analysis depth, and existing resources. The second main contribution of this thesis is the application-oriented evaluation of our methodology proposal in two applications: computer-assisted lexicography and statistical machine translation. For the former, we evaluate the usefulness of automatic MWE acquisition with the mwetoolkit for creating three lexicons: Greek nominal expressions, Portuguese complex predicates and Portuguese sentiment expressions. For the latter, we test several integration strategies in order to improve the treatment given to English phrasal verbs when translated by a standard statistical MT system into Portuguese. Both applications can benefit from automatic MWE acquisition, as the expressions acquired automatically from corpora can both speed up and improve the quality of the results. The promising results of previous and ongoing experiments encourage further investigation about the optimal way to integrate MWE treatment into other applications. Thus, we conclude the thesis with an overview of the past, ongoing and future work.

Orientador: Bento Carlos Dias da Silva / Banca: Beatriz Nunes de Oliveira Longo / Banca: Dirce Charara Monteiro / Banca: Gladis Maria de Barcellos Almeida / Banca: Heronides Maurílio de Melo Moura / Resumo: O objetivo desta tese é desenvolver um estudo lingüístico-computacional exploratório de um problema específico que deve ser enfrentado por sistemas de tradução automática: o problema da divergências de tradução quer de natureza sintática quer de natureza léxico-semântica que se verificam entre pares de sentenças de línguas naturais diferentes. Para isso, fundamenta-se na metodologia de pesquisa interdisciplinar em PLN (Processamento Automático de Línguas Naturais) de Dias-da-Silva (1996, 1998 e 2003) e na teoria lingüístico-computacional subjacente ao sistema de tradução automática UNITRAN de Dorr (1993), que, por sua vez é subsidiado pela teoria sintática dos princípios e Parâmetros de Chomsky (1981) e pela teoria semântica das Estruturas conceituais de Jackendoff (1990). Como contribuição, a tese descreve a composição e o funcionamento do UNITRAN, desenhado para dar conta de parte do problema posto pelas divergências de tradução e ilustra a possibilidade de inclusão do português nesse sistema através do exame de alguns tipos de divergências que se verificam entre frases do inglês e do português. / Abstract: This dissertation aims to develop an exploratory linguistic and computational study of an especific type of problem that must be faced by machine translation systems: the problem of translation divergences, whether syntactic or lexical-semantic ones that can be verified between distinct natural language sentence. In order to achieve this aim, this work is based on the interdisciplinary research metodology of the NLP (Natural Language Processing) field developed by Dias-da-Silva (1996, 1998 & 2003) and on the linguistic computacional theory behind UNITRAN, a machine translation systemdeveloped by Dorr (1993), a system that is on its turned based on Chomsky's syntactic theory of Government and Binding (1981) and Jackendoff's semantic theory of Conceptual Structures (1990). As a contribution to the field of NLP, this dissertation describes the machinery of UNITRAN, designed to deal with part of the problem of translation divergencies, and it illustrates the possibility of including Brazilian Portuguese language in the system through the investigation of certain kinds of divergences that can be found between English and Brazilian Portuguese senteces. / Doutor

The treatment of multiword expressions (MWEs), like take off, bus stop and big deal, is a challenge for NLP applications. This kind of linguistic construction is not only arbitrary but also much more frequent than one would initially guess. This thesis investigates the behaviour of MWEs across different languages, domains and construction types, proposing and evaluating an integrated methodological framework for their acquisition. There have been many theoretical proposals to define, characterise and classify MWEs. We adopt generic definition stating that MWEs are word combinations which must be treated as a unit at some level of linguistic processing. They present a variable degree of institutionalisation, arbitrariness, heterogeneity and limited syntactic and semantic variability. There has been much research on automatic MWE acquisition in the recent decades, and the state of the art covers a large number of techniques and languages. Other tasks involving MWEs, namely disambiguation, interpretation, representation and applications, have received less emphasis in the field. The first main contribution of this thesis is the proposal of an original methodological framework for automatic MWE acquisition from monolingual corpora. This framework is generic, language independent, integrated and contains a freely available implementation, the mwetoolkit. It is composed of independent modules which may themselves use multiple techniques to solve a specific sub-task in MWE acquisition. The evaluation of MWE acquisition is modelled using four independent axes. We underline that the evaluation results depend on parameters of the acquisition context, e.g., nature and size of corpora, language and type of MWE, analysis depth, and existing resources. The second main contribution of this thesis is the application-oriented evaluation of our methodology proposal in two applications: computer-assisted lexicography and statistical machine translation. For the former, we evaluate the usefulness of automatic MWE acquisition with the mwetoolkit for creating three lexicons: Greek nominal expressions, Portuguese complex predicates and Portuguese sentiment expressions. For the latter, we test several integration strategies in order to improve the treatment given to English phrasal verbs when translated by a standard statistical MT system into Portuguese. Both applications can benefit from automatic MWE acquisition, as the expressions acquired automatically from corpora can both speed up and improve the quality of the results. The promising results of previous and ongoing experiments encourage further investigation about the optimal way to integrate MWE treatment into other applications. Thus, we conclude the thesis with an overview of the past, ongoing and future work.

Advances in technology over the last few decades have led to significant changes in the way we communicate. Technological innovation has been one of the reasons for the development of computer-mediated communication (CMC), which has had far-reaching implications in the private and professional lives of many people. Instant messaging (IM), which is one form of computer-mediated communication, has significantly gained popularity over the years and many scholars have examined its influence in areas including business and academics. Initially developed to enhance communication between users who understood the same language, some IM clients including Wechat (www.wechat.com), QQ International (www.imqq.com), and Skype Translator (www.skype.com) have integrated a built-in translation application that facilitates communication among users that speak different languages. The current research project explores the relationship between machine translation, IM, and foreign language (FL) learning. In particular, it investigates whether machine-translated IM could improve the willingness to communicate (WTC) of beginner FL learners and whether the IM translation tool offers learners opportunities to communicate (OTC) in the FL. To answer these questions, China-based beginner FL learners were recruited and paired with native and near-native English speakers based in Canada. China-based participants completed two questionnaires and also exchanged (machine-translated) IM on selected topics with Canada-based participants for a period of ten weeks. Some China-based participants communicated with the help of the IM translation tool, while the others communicated without the tool. After analyzing the data gathered during the study, we found that WTC increased more for participants with the IM translation tool than for participants without the IM translation tool. Our analysis also indicated that the IM translation tool offered participants OTC in English. This was illustrated in various conversation aspects including number of words and turns exchanged, synchronous exchanges, ownership, conversation enhancement, topics discussed, tasks undertaken, and requests for paraphrase, repetition and explanation. In the discussion of the implications of our findings, we outline how the research project reinforced our understanding of the concept of WTC in a technology driven FL learning environment. We also discuss the implications of our findings for machine translation (MT), FL, and translation studies. Our discussion focuses on the debate on the tools to use and content to teach in the translator and FL training environments as well as various concepts in translation studies including MT quality, writing for MT, fit-for-purpose MT, collaboration and MT post-editing. This project enables us to test the applicability of MT in a different context using a novel group of users. The project therefore contributes to ongoing research on the relationship between CMC (specifically IM), MT, and FL learning, as well as to our knowledge of applications and perceptions of MT.

CoordenaÃÃo de AperfeiÃoamento de NÃvel Superior / Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst / A traduÃÃo automÃtica (TA) teve grande parte de sua credibilidade questionada por tradutores profissionais por muitos anos. No entanto, o uso de sistemas de TA tornou-se uma necessidade, a fim de organizar e acelerar o processo de traduÃÃo. A maioria dos usuÃrios, profissionais ou nÃo, nÃo tem conhecimento sobre o design das ferramentas que integram o sistema que eles usam. A concepÃÃo de um sistema de TA consiste de uma cadeia de ferramentas que formam o motor de um sistema de TA. Assim, propÃe-se a descriÃÃo e a criaÃÃo de uma ferramenta de traduÃÃo que seja capaz de lidar com expressÃes nominais da lÃngua Inglesa para portuguesa. As expressÃes nominais em InglÃs podem ser compostas de elementos como genitivo e gerÃndios, que nÃo apresentam correspondentes para o portuguÃs. Assim, estes elementos causam dificuldades para os sistemas de TA . O nosso objetivo à o de criar um sistema de TA que seja capaz de lidar com este problema de maneira satisfatÃria. O sistema desenvolvido e descrito nesta tese foi treinado com expressÃes nominais do corpus Europarl e testado com expressÃes nominais tratadas na literatura sobre a sintaxe dos sintagmas nominais. Nosso sistema apresentou resultados que consideramos satisfatÃrios de acordo com escores obtidos nas avaliaÃÃes manual e automÃtica ao compararmos com os resultados obtidos por outros sistemas de TA disponÃveis gratuitamente para utilizaÃÃo. / Machine translation (MT) had much of its credibility questioned by professional translators for many years. However, the use of MT systems has become a necessity in order to organize and accelerate the translation process. Most users, professionals or not, have no knowledge about the design of the tools that integrate the system they use. The design of a MT system consists of a pipeline of tools that form the systemâs engine. Thus, we propose the description and the creation of a translation tool that would able to handle nominal expressions from English to Portuguese. The nominal expressions in English may be composed of elements as genitive and gerunds, which lack Portuguese correspondents. Thus, these elements cause difficulties for MT systems. Our goal is to create a MT system that is able to deal satisfactorily with this problem. The system developed and described in this thesis was trained with nominal expressions from the Europarl corpus and tested with nominal expressions handled in the literature of noun phrases syntax. Our system showed what we consider satisfactory results according to the scores in the manual and automatic evaluation when we compare the results from other MT systems freely available for use.

The treatment of multiword expressions (MWEs), like take off, bus stop and big deal, is a challenge for NLP applications. This kind of linguistic construction is not only arbitrary but also much more frequent than one would initially guess. This thesis investigates the behaviour of MWEs across different languages, domains and construction types, proposing and evaluating an integrated methodological framework for their acquisition. There have been many theoretical proposals to define, characterise and classify MWEs. We adopt generic definition stating that MWEs are word combinations which must be treated as a unit at some level of linguistic processing. They present a variable degree of institutionalisation, arbitrariness, heterogeneity and limited syntactic and semantic variability. There has been much research on automatic MWE acquisition in the recent decades, and the state of the art covers a large number of techniques and languages. Other tasks involving MWEs, namely disambiguation, interpretation, representation and applications, have received less emphasis in the field. The first main contribution of this thesis is the proposal of an original methodological framework for automatic MWE acquisition from monolingual corpora. This framework is generic, language independent, integrated and contains a freely available implementation, the mwetoolkit. It is composed of independent modules which may themselves use multiple techniques to solve a specific sub-task in MWE acquisition. The evaluation of MWE acquisition is modelled using four independent axes. We underline that the evaluation results depend on parameters of the acquisition context, e.g., nature and size of corpora, language and type of MWE, analysis depth, and existing resources. The second main contribution of this thesis is the application-oriented evaluation of our methodology proposal in two applications: computer-assisted lexicography and statistical machine translation. For the former, we evaluate the usefulness of automatic MWE acquisition with the mwetoolkit for creating three lexicons: Greek nominal expressions, Portuguese complex predicates and Portuguese sentiment expressions. For the latter, we test several integration strategies in order to improve the treatment given to English phrasal verbs when translated by a standard statistical MT system into Portuguese. Both applications can benefit from automatic MWE acquisition, as the expressions acquired automatically from corpora can both speed up and improve the quality of the results. The promising results of previous and ongoing experiments encourage further investigation about the optimal way to integrate MWE treatment into other applications. Thus, we conclude the thesis with an overview of the past, ongoing and future work.

Esta dissertação apresenta o aperfeiçoamento de um sistema de tradução automática português-inglês. Nosso objetivo principal é criar regras de transferência estrutural entre o par de línguas português e inglês e avaliar, através do uso da métrica de avaliação METEOR, o desempenho do sistema. Para isto, utilizamos um corpus teste criado especialmente para esta pesquisa. Tendo como ponto de partida a relevância de uma correta tradução para os tempos verbais de uma sentença, este trabalho priorizou a criação de regras que tratassem a transferência entre os tempos verbais do português brasileiro para o inglês americano. Devido ao fato de os verbos em português estarem distribuídos por três conjugações, criamos um corpus para cada uma dessas conjugações. O objetivo da criação desses corpora é verificar a aplicação das regras de transferência estrutural entre os tempos verbais em todas as três classes de conjugação. Após a criação dos corpora, mapeamos os tempos verbais em português no modo indicativo, subjuntivo e imperativo para os tempos verbais do inglês. Em seguida, iniciamos a construção das regras de transferência estrutural entre os tempos verbais mapeados. Ao final da construção das regras, submetemos os corpora obedecendo as três classes de conjugação à métrica de avaliação automática METEOR. Os resultados da avaliação do sistema após a inserção das regras apresentaram uma regressão quando comparado a avaliação do sistema no estágio inicial da pesquisa. Detectamos, através de análises dos resultados, que a métrica de avaliação automática METEOR não foi sensível às modificações feitas no sistema, embora as regras criadas sigam a gramática tradicional da língua portuguesa e estejam sendo aplicadas a todas as três classes de conjugação. Apresentamos em detalhes o conjunto de regras sintáticas e os corpora utilizados neste estudo, e que acreditamos serem de utilidade geral para quaisquer sistemas de tradução automática entre o português brasileiro e o inglês americano. Outra contribuição deste trabalho está em discutir os valores apresentados pela métrica METEOR e sugerir que novos ajustes sejam feitos a esses parâmetros utilizados pela métrica. / This dissertation presents the development of a Portuguese-to-English Machine Translation system. Our main objective is creating structural transfer rules between this pair of languages, and evaluate the performance of the system using the METEOR evaluation metric. Therefore, we developed a corpus to enable this study. Taking translation relevance as a starting point, we focused on verbal tenses and developed rules that dealt with transfer between verbal tenses from the Brazilian Portuguese to US English. Due to the fact that verbs in Portuguese are distributed in three conjugations, we created one corpus for each of these conjugations. The objective was to verify the application of structural transfer rules between verbal tenses in each conjugation class in isolation. After creating these corpora, we mapped the Portuguese verbal tenses in the indicative, subjunctive and imperative modes to English. Next, we constructed structural transfer rules to these mapped verbal tenses. After constructing these rules, we evaluated our corpora using the METEOR evaluation metric. The results of this evaluation showed lack of improvement after the insertion of these transfer rules, when compared to the initial stage of the system. We detected that the METEOR evaluation metric was not sensible to these modi_cations made to the system, even though they were linguistically sound and were being applied correctly to the sentences. We introduce in details the set of transfer rules and corpora used in this study, and we believe they are general enough to be useful in any rule-based Portuguese-to-English Machine Translation system. Another contribution of this work lies in the discussion of the results presented by the METEOR metric. We suggest adjustments to be made to its parameters, in order to make it more sensible to sentences variation such as those introduced by our rules.

Submitted by Geandra Rodrigues (geandrar@gmail.com) on 2018-11-01T18:58:55Z No. of bitstreams: 1 tatianesilvatavares.pdf: 3652351 bytes, checksum: ab319a3daf577b4727647589658a6657 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2018-11-23T11:24:07Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 tatianesilvatavares.pdf: 3652351 bytes, checksum: ab319a3daf577b4727647589658a6657 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-11-23T11:24:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 tatianesilvatavares.pdf: 3652351 bytes, checksum: ab319a3daf577b4727647589658a6657 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-09-28 / Esta pesquisa tem por objetivo investigar as contribuições que a FrameNet e o Constructicon podem oferecer aos sistemas de Tradução por Máquina (TM) ao revisitar a literatura sobre Gramática das Construções e Padrões de Cunhagem (KAY, 2013). A hipótese é a de que utilização da base de dados de uma FrameNet, que oferece representações computacionais das estruturas cognitivas essenciais na construção do sentido (os frames), e de um Constructicon, o qual integra a informação sobre a gramática de uma língua, podem auxiliar o processamento de línguas naturais pelo computador e, consequentemente, auxiliar os sistemas de Tradução por Máquina. O segundo recorte deste trabalho refere-se à revisão da Gramática das Construções, especialmente em relação ao tratamento de padrões de cunhagem. Segundo a abordagem de Kay (2005, 2013), deve-se considerar como construção apenas a quantidade mínima de informação que o falante precisa ter para que seja capaz de entender e produzir sentenças da língua. Nesta perspectiva, assume-se que as construções de uma língua sejam estes padrões mais gerais e produtivos, os quais licenciam as mais diversas sentenças compreensíveis pelo falante. Por isso buscamos reanalisar a estrutura de quantificação indefinida: i) mar de gente, ii) oceano de calúnias, iii) enxurrada de notícias, já investigada em dissertação de mestrado (TAVARES, 2014), a fim de que se possa discutir a validade da abordagem de Kay para a modelagem computacional do padrão de quantificação. A análise dos dados é guiada pelos pressupostos da Semântica de Frames (FILLLMORE, 1982,1985; PETRUCK, 1996) e pela metodologia da FrameNet, a qual emprega a análise semântica e sintática dos objetos de investigação, pois, para as tarefas de Processamento de Línguas Naturais, é necessário que se leve em conta as regularidades da língua para que esta seja processada computacionalmente. A conclusão da análise aponta para o fato de que a modelagem da estrutura de quantificação indefinida como uma rede de padrões de cunhagem no Constructicon da FrameNet Brasil, definidos a partir de restrições soft, pode trazer um ganho de generalidade na análise e a possibilidade de que estruturas inovadoras, cunhadas por analogia, sejam igualmente reconhecíveis pelo modelo computacional resultante, o que representa um avanço em relação aos processos tradicionalmente empregados na hibridização de sistemas de tradução por máquina. / This work aims to investigate the contributions that the FrameNet and the Constructicon could offer to Machine Translation (MT) systems by revisiting the literature about Construction Grammar and Coinage Patterns (KAY, 2013). The hypothesis is that by using the FrameNet database, which offers computational representations of essential cognitive structures formeaning construction (frames), and a Constructicon database, which integrates information about the grammar of a language, it is possible to support the natural language processing by the computer and, consequently, to assist Machine Translation systems. The second point of this work refers to the review of Construction Grammar, especially the treatment of coinage patterns. According to Kay’s approach (2005, 2013), it must be considered a construction only the minimal quantity of information that a speaker needs to be able to understand and to produce sentences of the language. From this perspective, it is assumed that constructions of a language are these more general and productive patterns, which license many comprehensible sentences by the speaker. For this reason we seek to reanalyze the indefinite quantity structure: i) mar de gente, ii) oceano de calúnias, iii) enxurrada de notícias, already investigated in a dissertation (TAVARES, 2014), in order to discuss the validity of Kay's approach to the computational modeling of the quantification pattern. The analyses is guided by Frame Semantics principles (FILLLMORE, 1982,1985; PETRUCK, 1996) and by FrameNet methodology, which applies a semantic and syntactic analyses to the objects of this research, because dealing with Natural Language Processing demands an account for the language regularities so it can be computationally processed. The conclusion of the analysis points to the fact that the modeling of the indefinite quantification structure as a network of coinage patterns in the FrameNet Brasil Constructicon, defined from soft constraints, can bring about a gain of generality in the analysis and the possibility that innovative structures, coined by analogy, are equally recognizable by the resulting computational model, which represents an advance over the processes traditionally employed in the hybridization of machine translation systems.