LINGUIST List 11.1982

Tue Sep 19 2000

Qs: VARBRUL/Salient Factors, MT Evaluations

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. gill cai, Salient factors using the VARBRUL program
2. Tim Read, Machine translation evaluations wanted

My name is Cai Jinting, working at my PhD dissertation at present in
China. As a cross-sectional study, this dissertation intends to
uncover the relative contributions of some factors to the variations
of tense and aspect in the English interlanguage of Chinese-speaking
college students. The primary instrument in analyzing the data is
VARBRUL program. According to its requirements, all the possible
factors influencing the choice of tense and aspect in learner English
should be taken into account, though some of them may be deleted
during the analyzing process. I have considered some factors,
including verb salience, lexical aspect, temporal adverbial,
proficiency and gender, but there may be others I neglected but are
important. Therefore I seek helps from linguists all around the world.
Could any linguist inform me other possible factors? Are my factors
potentially valid? You are extremely welcome if you can also offer
some information on the sources where I can find evidence for their
effect in SLA.





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I am working on a project where we want to include a (probably
commercial) machine translation system with other software we are
developing to enable users to move materials between languages. Before
integrating such a thing with what we have we are interested in
finding any evaluations that have made between the common machine
translation systems that are available, which works best in which
conditions, etc. Does anyone know where I can find such information?

Many thanks in advance.

Tim Read
treadieec.uned.es