This original volume describes the Spoken Language Translator (SLT), one of the first major automatic speech translation projects. The SLT system can translate between English, French, and Swedish in the domain of air travel planning, using a vocabulary of about 1500 words, and with an accuracy of about 75%. The authors detail the language processing components, largely built on top of the SRI Core Language Engine, using a combination of general grammars and techniques that allow them to be rapidly customized to specific domains. They base speech recognition on Hidden Markov Mode technology, and use versions of the SRI DECIPHER system. This account of SLT is an essential resource for researchers interested in knowing what is achievable in spoken-language translation today.

This collection of papers takes linguists to the leading edge of techniques in generative lexicon theory, the linguistic composition methodology that arose from the imperative to provide a compositional semantics for the contextual modifications in meaning that emerge in real linguistic usage. Today's growing shift towards distributed compositional analyses evinces the applicability of GL theory, and the contributions to this volume, presented at three international workshops (GL-2003, GL-2005 and GL-2007) address the relationship between compositionality in language and the mechanisms of selection in grammar that are necessary to maintain this property. The core unresolved issues in compositionality, relating to the interpretation of context and the mechanisms of selection, are treated from varying perspectives within GL theory, including its basic theoretical mechanisms and its analytical viewpoint on linguistic phenomena.

This volume is a collection of original contributions that address the problem of words and their meaning. This represents a still difficult and controversial area within various disciplines: linguistics, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. Although all of these disciplines have to tackle the issue, so far there is no overarching methodology agreed upon by researchers. The aim of the volume is to provide answers based on empirical linguistics methods that are relevant across all the disciplines and provide a bridge among researchers looking at word meaning from different angles.

This collection of papers takes linguists to the leading edge of techniques in generative lexicon theory, the linguistic composition methodology that arose from the imperative to provide a compositional semantics for the contextual modifications in meaning that emerge in real linguistic usage. Today's growing shift towards distributed compositional analyses evinces the applicability of GL theory, and the contributions to this volume, presented at three international workshops (GL-2003, GL-2005 and GL-2007) address the relationship between compositionality in language and the mechanisms of selection in grammar that are necessary to maintain this property. The core unresolved issues in compositionality, relating to the interpretation of context and the mechanisms of selection, are treated from varying perspectives within GL theory, including its basic theoretical mechanisms and its analytical viewpoint on linguistic phenomena.

Digital health translation is an important application of machine translation and multilingual technologies, and there is a growing need for accessibility in digital health translation design for disadvantaged communities. This book addresses that need by highlighting state-of-the-art research on the design and evaluation of assistive translation tools, along with systems to facilitate cross-cultural and cross-lingual communications in health and medical settings. Using case studies as examples, the principles of designing assistive health communication tools are illustrated. These are (1) detectability of errors to boost user confidence by health professionals; (2) customizability for health and medical domains; (3) inclusivity of translation modalities to serve people with disabilities; and (4) equality of accessibility standards for localised multilingual websites of health contents. This book will appeal to readers from natural language processing, computer science, linguistics, translation studies, public health, media, and communication studies. This title is available as open access on Cambridge Core.

This volume is a collection of original contributions from outstanding scholars in linguistics, philosophy and computational linguistics exploring the relation between word meaning and human linguistic creativity. The papers present different aspects surrounding the question of what is word meaning, a problem that has been the centre of heated debate in all those disciplines that directly or indirectly are concerned with the study of language and of human cognition. The discussions are centred around a view of the mental lexicon, as outlined in the Generative Lexicon theory (Pustejovsky, 1995), which proposes a unified model for defining word meaning. The individual contributors present their evidence for a generative approach as well as critical perspectives, which provides for a volume where word meaning is not viewed only from a particular angle or from a particular concern, but from a wide variety of topics, each introduced and explained by the editors.

This book presents a detailed description of Spoken Language Translator (SLT), one of the first major projects in the area of automatic speech translation. The SLT system can translate between English, French, and Swedish in the domain of air travel planning, using a vocabulary of about 1500 words, and with an accuracy of about 75 per cent. The greater part of the book describes the language processing components, which are largely built on top of the SRI Core Language Engine, using a combination of general grammars and techniques that allow them to be rapidly customized to specific domains. Speech recognition is based on Hidden Markov Mode technology, and uses versions of the SRI DECIPHER system. This account of the Spoken Language Translator should be an essential resource both for those who wish to know what is achievable in spoken-language translation today, and for those who wish to understand how to achieve it.