Describes the French-English version of the SYSTRAN machine translation system, used by the Commission of European Communities, and an evaluation study which examined the quality, cost, and weaknesses of the system. The study concluded that this type of system is useful for "pretranslation" and "rough" translation only. (AM)

Describes the use of automated programs in gathering data on Cree. (AM)

Discusses the intricacies of text analysis as approached by computer-assisted corpus linguistics, focusing on meaning relations in the text. The article points out that it is possible to distinguish several different approaches, according to whether the focus is on intralingual or interlingual parallel texts. (12 references) (Author/CK)

This paper locates computational and behavioral studies of children's language learning in a theoretical framework; reviews four articles in this journal issue on learning word meanings and sounds and on setting grammatical parameters; highlights "autonomous bootstrapping" strategies that children use to represent uncertain linguistic…

Reports findings of a corpus analysis of a grammatical structure taught in intermediate- or advanced-level English-as-a-Second-/Foreign-Language texts: clauses that contain the modal "would" to signify hypothetical and counterfactual meaning. Categorizes the conditional and hypothetical uses of would-clauses in spoken and written corpora…

Reports on a computer application in which collaboration did not precede project design. Important project parameters established without author input presented ethical dilemmas in balancing contract obligations and methodological rigor. (Author/CK)

Uzbek, a left-branching subject-object-verb language with an extensive agglutinative morphology, must be handled computationally using special algorithms. The merits of various parsing schemes and a cascaded morphology are analyzed, and a functional Uzbek parsing system, based on the Generalized Transition Network parser, is described. (12…

Describes the architecture and functioning of a system developed specifically for text processing applications--such as information retrieval--that can benefit from structural comparisons between elements of text, such as queries and abstracts. The general ways in which the system performs matches and the ways in which this objective influenced…

Analyzes different kinds of reformulations used in information retrieval systems where full text databases are accessed through natural language queries. Tests of these reformulations on large full text databases managed by the Syntactic and Probabilistic Indexing and Retrieval of Information in Texts (SPIRIT) system are described, and an expert…

Describes SCISOR (System for Conceptual Information Summarization, Organization and Retrieval), a prototype intelligent information retrieval system that extracts useful information from large bodies of text. It overcomes limitations of linguistic coverage by applying a text processing strategy that is tolerant of unknown words and gaps in…

Summarizes a range of theoretical approaches to language acquisition. Argues that language representations emerge from interactions at all levels from brain to society. Connectionism, which provides a set of computational tools for exploring the conditions under which emergent properties arise, is discussed, and simulations of emergence of…

Pinpoints specificities of computer-aided corpus-based work in foreign language pedagogic contexts and assesses how they can feed into language teaching and learning practices generally, despite the ostensible pedagogic and processing shortcomings of corpus-based work in these kinds of contexts. (Author/VWL)

Presents a new dimension of lexical variation--contextual distinctiveness. CD is a corpus-derived summary measure of the frequency distribution of the contexts in which a word occurs, and it is naturally compatible with contextual theories of semantic representation and meaning. An experiment shows that CD is a better predictor of lexical decision…

The author replies to a critique a paper he wrote on defining applied linguistics as a field of inquiry and the extent to which corpus analysis can properly inform its practices. (Author/VWL)

This paper surveys work on applying the insights of lexicalized grammars to low-level discourse, to show the value of positing an autonomous grammar for low-level discourse in which words (or idiomatic phrases) are associated with discourse-level predicate-argument structures or modification structures that convey their syntactic-semantic meaning…