LINGUIST List 4.262

Fri 09 Apr 1993

Qs: Interlingua, discourse & video, negator, transfer

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , deficiencies of the interlingual approach to machine translation
2. Kate Finn, Discourse Analysis of VideoTeleconferencing, CSCW,...
3. RichardHudson50, A rude negator
4. "Kate Ksiazek", Lexical transfer

Hello everybody,
I am writing to request whether you know any literature on the posted
translation. I will summarize the responses.
Any pointers or suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Hello,

I'm trying to find out what, if any, work has been done in the area
of analyzing on-line dialogues, in environments such as computer-
supported collaborative work (CSCW) or videoteleconferencing.
For comparison purposes, analysis of face-to-face collaborative meetings
or design sessions would also be very helpful.

The sorts of data I'm interested in would include utterance type and
length, pauses between speakers, number and type of interruptions or
collisions, etc.

If anyone has worked in these areas or knows of someone else's work,
could you please send me the references?

Thanks in advance,
 Kate Finn

I've just spotted a new English negator: BOLLOCKS. This has been around
for a long time as in "Bollocks!" meaning `That's rubbish!", but it's
just been used, twice in half an hour, by my 15-year old daughter in
"Bollocks he did", meaning `That's rubbish - he didn't', with no
intonation break. Further interrogation revealed that she distinguished
it clearly from "Bollocks, he did", meaning `That's rubbish - he did'.

Has anyone else heard this? Is the same possible with any other expression
of disagreement (e.g. NONSENSE)? For me at least, "Nonsense he did" is quite
impossible, with no intonation boundary and meaning `He didn't'.

Will it last?

Dick Hudson
Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics,
University College London,
Gower Street,
London WC1E 6BT
(071) 387 7050 ext 3152

I am experimenting with implementing lexical transfer for the purpose
of machine translation and would be very interested in the following:

- examples, in which the difficulties of one to many translation (one
word in source language corresponds to several in the target language)
can be resolved on the basis of the style of the text (style: eg.
formal, informal, technical, etc.) For example: German Magen can be
translated into English as stomach or belly depending on the
informality of the context, the French word domicile can be translated
both as home or domicile.

- I am also interested in examples where a verb phrase or noun phrase
in the source language translates into one word in the target
language. For example: commit suicide in English se suicider in French

I would be very grateful for any examples of the above.
_______________________________________
Kate Ksiazek kksiazekcs.indiana.edu