LINGUIST List 13.409

Thu Feb 14 2002

FYI: Handheld Speech Translator, English Word Pairs

Editor for this issue: Marie Klopfenstein <marielinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Michael Johnstone, Handheld speech translator
2. Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Word similarity test collection available

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1814000/1814724.stm
reports a handheld machine that can translate English speech "regardless
of your accent" into French, German, Spanish and soon Chinese. "The
Universal Translator UT-103 was developed by the Ectaco company based in
St Petersburg, Russia."

It doesn't quite match native-speaker competence though: "The specially
developed speech recognition software allows it to recognise and translate
3,000 phrases commonly used in all kinds of travel."

Michael Johnstone (Cambridge Uni)

Dear colleagues,

A new word similarity test collection (WordSimilarity-353)
is now available at
http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~gabr/resources/data/wordsim353/wordsim353.html

The collection contains 353 English word pairs along with
human-assigned similarity judgements. The collection can be
used to train and/or test computer algorithms implementing
semantic similarity measures (i.e., algorithms that
numerically estimate similarity of natural language words).
The similarity of each word pair in the collection was
assessed by 13 to 16 subjects on a scale from 0 (totally
unrelated words) to 10 (very much related or identical
words). The Web page above also provides a number of links
to other word similarity resources on the Internet.

Regards,

Evgeniy Gabrilovich.

- 
Evgeniy Gabrilovich
Ph.D. student in Computer Science
Department of Computer Science, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Technion City, Haifa 32000, Israel
E-mail: gabrcs.technion.ac.il WWW: http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~gabr