This paper profiles the Europarl part of an English-Swedish parallel corpus and compares it with three other subcorpora of the sameparallel corpus. We first describe our method for comparison which is based on alignments, both at the token level and the structurallevel. Although two of the other subcorpora contains fiction, it is found that the Europarl part is the one having the highest proportion ofmany types of restructurings, including additions, deletions and long distance reorderings. We explain this by the fact that the majorityof Europarl segments are parallel translations.

Since the SweClarin project began in 2015 its resources in terms of data and tools have been used in many different projects including linguistics. A research area where they have been less employed is the study of names. In this paper I suggest that language technology and general corpora can be used to contribute to the sociological study of personal names and offer a few examples. As is fit for the occasioin I take Lars as the point of departure. 

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As machine translation technology improves comparisons to human performance are often made in quite general and exaggerated terms. Thus, it is important to be able to account for differences accurately. This paper reports a simple, descriptive scheme for comparing translations and applies it to two translations of a British opinion article published in March, 2017. One is a human translation (HT) into Swedish, and the other a machine translation (MT). While the comparison is limited to one text, the results are indicative of current limitations in MT.

Fixed multiword expressions are common in many, if not all, natural languages. In the Universal Dependenciesframework, UD, a subset of these expressions are modelled with the dependency relation fixed, targeting themost grammaticalized cases of functional multiword items. In this paper we perform a detailed analysis of 439expressions modelled with fixed in two Swedish UD treebanks in order to reduce their numbers and fit thedefinition of fixed better. We identify a large number of dimensions of variation for fixed multiword expressionsthat can be used for the purpose. We also point out several problematic aspects of the current UD approachto multiword expressions and discuss different alternative solutions for modelling fixed expresions. We suggestthat insights from Constructional Grammar (CxG) can help with a more systematic treatment of fixed expressions in UD.

This paper presents an English-Swedish Parallel Treebank, LinES, that is currently under development. LinES is intended as a resource for the study of variation in translation of common syntactic constructions from English to Swedish. For this reason, annotation in LinES is syntactically oriented, multi-level, complete and manually reviewed according to guidelines. Another aim of LinES is to support queries made in terms of types of translation shifts.

As the first holder of the first chair in computational linguistics in Sweden, Anna Sågvall Hein has played a central role in the development of computational linguistics and language technology both in Sweden and on the international scene. Besides her valuable contributions to research, which include work on machine translation, syntactic parsing, grammar checking, word prediction, and corpus linguistics, she has been instrumental in establishing a national graduate school in language technology as well as an undergraduate program in language technology at Uppsala University. It is with great pleasure that we present her with this Festschrift to honor her lasting contributions to the field and to commemorate her retirement from the chair in computational linguistics at Uppsala University. The contributions to the Festschrift come from Anna’s friends and colleagues around the world and deal with many of the topics that are dear to her heart. A common theme in many of the articles, as well as in Anna’s own scientific work, is the design, development and use of adequate language technology resources, epitomized in the title Resourceful Language Technology.

As for any categorial scheme used for annotation, UD abound with borderline cases. The main instruments to resolve them are the UD design principles and, of course, the linguistic facts of the matter. UD makes a fundamental distinction between content words and function words, and a, perhaps less fundamental, distinction between pure function words and the rest. It has been suggested that adpositions are to be included among the pure function words. In this paper I discuss the case of prepositions in Swedish and related languages in the light of these distinctions. It relates to a more general problem: How should we resolve cases where the linguistic intuitions and UD design principles are in conflict?

In principle the CLARIN research infrastructure provides a good environment to support research on translation. In reality, the progress within CLARIN in this area seems to be fairly slow. In this paper I will give examples of the resources currently available, and suggest what is needed to achieve a relevant research infrastructure for translation studies. Also, I argue that translation studies has more to gain from language technology, and statistical machine translation in particular, than what is generally assumed, and give some examples.

The parataxis relation as defined for Universal Dependencies 2.0 is general and, for this reason,sometimes hard to distinguish from competing analyses, such as coordination, conj, or apposi-tion, appos. The specific subtypes that are listed for parataxis are also quite different in character.In this study we first show that the actual practice by UD-annotators is varied, using the parallelUD (PUD-) treebanks as data. We then review the current definitions and guidelines and suggestimprovements.

Recent improvements in neural machinetranslation calls for increased efforts onqualitative evaluations so as to get a betterunderstanding of differences in translationcompetence between human and machine.This paper reports the results of a studyof 1170 adjectives in translation from En-glish to Swedish, using the Parallel Uni-versal Dependencies Treebanks for theselanguages. The comparison covers two di-mensions: the types of solutions employedand the incidence of debatable or incorrecttranslations. It is found that the machinetranslation uses all of the solution typesthat the human translation does, but in dif-ferent proportions and less competently

Aligned parallel corpora constitute a critical information resource for a great number of linguistic and technological endeavors. Automatic sentence alignment has reached a level whereby large parallel documents can be fully aligned with the aid of interactive post-editing tools. Word alignment systems have not yet reached the same level of performance, but are good enough to support full word alignment if embedded in an interactive system. In this paper we describe a system for fast and accurate word alignment currently under development at our department, where the user can review and improve the output from an automatic system in an incremental fashion.

Habitability and robustness have been noted as important qualities of natural-language interfaces. In this paper we discuss how these requirements can be met, in particular as regards the system's ability to support a coherent and smooth dialogue. The discussion is based on current work on customizing a dialogue system for three different applications.   We adopt a sublanguage approach to the problem and propose a method for customization combining bottom-up use of empirical data with a global pragmatic analysis of a given application. Finally, we suggest three design principles that have emerged from our work called the sublanguage principle, the asymmetry principle and the quantity principle.

In Swedish, as in other languages, the words used to refer to disabilities and people with disabilities are manifold. Recommendations as to which terms to use have been changed several times over the last hundred years. In this exploratory paper we have used textual resources provided by Swe-Clarin to study such changes quantitatively. We demonstrate that old and new recommendations co-exist for long periods of time, and that usage sometimes converges.

We show how the tools and language resources developed within the SweClarin infrastructure can be used to investigate changes in the use and understanding of the Swedish related words arkitektur, design, form, and formgivning. Specifically, we compare their use in two governmental public reports on design, one from 1999 and the other from 2015. We test the hypothesis that their meaning has developed in a way that blurs distinctions that may be important to stakeholders in the respective fields.

We investigate changes in the use of four Swedish words from the fields of design and archi- tecture. It has been suggested that their meanings have been blurred, especially in governmental reports and policy documents, so that distinctions between them that are important to stakeholders in the respective fields are lost. Specifically, we compare usage in two governmental public reports on design, one from 1999 and the other from 2015, and additionally in opinion responses to the 2015 report. Our approach is to contextualise occurrences of the words in different representations of the texts using word embeddings, topic modelling and sentiment analysis. Tools and language resources developed within the SweClarin infrastructure have been crucial for the implementation of the study.

The most promising approach to word alignment is to combine statistical methods with non-statistical information sources. Some of the proposed non-statistical sources, including bilingual dictionaries, POS-taggers and lemmatizers, rely on considerable linguistic knowledge, while other knowledge-lite sources such as cognate heuristics and word order heuristics can be implemented relatively easy. While knowledge-heavy sources might be expected to give better performance, knowledge-lite systems are easier to port to new language pairs and text types, and they can give sufficiently good results for many purposes, e.g. if the output is to be used by a human user for the creation of a complete word-aligned bitext. In this paper we describe the current status of the Linköping Word Aligner (LWA), which combines the use of statistical measures of co-occurrence with four knowledge-lite modules for (i)) word categorization, (ii) morphological variation, (iii) word order, and (iv) phrase recognition. We demonstrate the portability of the system (from English-Swedish texts to French-English texts) and present results for these two language-pairs. Finally, we will report observations from an error analysis of system output, and identify the major strengths and weaknesses of the system.

Hur förändras det svenska språket av datorer och IT-teknik? Hur påverkas svenska ord, meningar och texter? Ett tiotal språkvetare diskuterar vad ordbehandlare, e-post, internet och s.k. "översättningsmaskiner" kan få för konsekvenser för svenskan. Analyser och resonemang kring en mängd exempel från både myndighetsbrev och chattare på nätet

As empirical methods have come to the fore in multilingual language technology and translation studies, the processing of parallel texts and parallel corpora have become a major research area in computational linguistics. In this article we review the state of the art in alignment and data extraction techniques for parallel texts, and give an overview of current work in Sweden in this area. In a final section, we summarize the results achieved so far and make some proposals for future research.

Starting in 2018 Swe-Clarin members are working cross-instituionally on special themes. In thispaper we report ongoing work in a project aimed at the creation of a new gold standard forSwedish Named-Entity Recognition and Categorisation. In contrast to previous efforts the newresource will contain data from both social media and edited text. The resource will be madefreely available through Spr ̊akbankenText

We propose a system for use in translation teaching with automatic support for alignment and comparative assessment of different translations. A primary use of this system is for discussion in class and comparison of student translations from a given source text, but it may also be used to study and compare differences between published translations. We describe the intended functions of the system and give suggestions on its design and architecture. We also discuss the degree of automation that can be expected and report results from a small indicative study focused on word alignment performance.

The paper offers an effective way of teacher-student computer-based collabo-ration in translation class. We show how a quantitative-qualitative method of analysis supported by word alignment technology can be applied to student translations for use in the classroom. The combined use of natural-language pro-cessing and manual techniques enables students to ‘co-emerge’ during highly motivated collaborative sessions. Within the advocated approach, students are pro-active seekers for a better translation (grade) in a teacher-centered computer-based peer-assisted translation class.

In a SweClarin cooperation project we apply topic modelling to the texts found with pins in Pin-terest boards. The data in focus are digitisations of Viking Age finds from the Swedish History Museum and the underlying research question is how they are given new contextual meanings in boards. We illustrate how topic modelling can support interpretation of polysemy and culturally situated meanings. It expands on the employment of topic modelling by accentuating the necessity of interpretation in every step of the process from capturing and cleaning the data, to modelling and visualisation. The paper concludes that the national context of digitisations of Viking Age jewellery in the Swedish History Museum’s collection management system is re-placed by several transnational contexts in which Viking Age jewellery is appreciated for its symbolical meanings and decorative functions in contemporary genres for re-imagining, relivingand performing European pasts and mythologies. The emerging contexts on Pinterest also high-light the business opportunities involved in genres such as reenactment, neo-paganism, lajv and fantasy. The boards are clues to how digitisations serve as prototypes for replicas.

Using the technique of semantic mirroring a graph is obtained that represents words and their translationsfrom a parallel corpus or a bilingual lexicon. The connectedness of the graph holds information about the semanticrelations of words that occur in the translations. Spectral graph theory is used to partition the graph, which leadsto a grouping of the words in different clusters. We illustrate the method using a small sample of seed words froma lexicon of Swedish and English adjectives and discuss its application to computational lexical semantics andlexicography.

Using the technique of ”semantic mirroring”a graph is obtained that representswords and their translations from a parallelcorpus or a bilingual lexicon. The connectednessof the graph holds informationabout the different meanings of words thatoccur in the translations. Spectral graphtheory is used to partition the graph, whichleads to a grouping of the words accordingto different senses. We also report resultsfrom an evaluation using a small sample ofseed words from a lexicon of Swedish andEnglish adjectives.

Science education research suggests that our everyday intuitions of motion and interaction of physical objects fit well with how physicists use the term “momentum”. Corpus linguistics provides an easily accessible approach to study language in different domains, including everyday language. Analysis of language samples from English text corpora reveals a trend of increasing metaphorical use of “momentum” in non-science domains, and through conceptual metaphor analysis, we show that the use of the word in everyday language, as opposed to for instance “force”, is largely adequate from a physics point of view. In addition, “momentum” has recently been borrowed into Swedish as a metaphor in domains such as sports, politics and finance, with meanings similar to those in physics. As an implication for educational practice, we find support for the suggestion to introduce the term “momentum” to English-speaking pupils at an earlier age than what is typically done in the educational system today, thereby capitalising on their intuitions and experiences of everyday language. For Swedish-speaking pupils, and possibly also relevant to other languages, the parallel between “momentum” and the corresponding physics term in the students’ mother tongue could be made explicit.

Word alignment gold standards are an importantresource for developing and evaluatingword alignment methods. In thispaper we present a free English–Swedishword alignment gold standard consistingof texts from Europarl with manually verifiedword alignments. The gold standardcontains two sets of word aligned sentences,a test set for the purpose of evaluationand a training set that can be usedfor supervised training. The guidelinesused for English–Swedish alignment werecreated based on guidelines for other languagepairs and with statistical machinetranslation as the targeted application. Wealso present results of intrinsic evaluationusing our gold standard and discuss the relationshipto extrinsic evaluation in a statisticalmachine translation system.

This paper presents the LIU system for the WMT 2011 shared task for translation between German and English. For English– German we attempted to improve the translation tables with a combination of standard statistical word alignments and phrase-based word alignments. For German–English translation we tried to make the German text more similar to the English text by normalizing German morphology and performing rule-based clause reordering of the German text. This resulted in small improvements for both translation directions.

We present a method for improving word alignment quality for phrase-based statistical machine translation by reordering the source text according to the target word order suggested by an initial word alignment. The reordered text is used to create a second word alignment which can be an improvement of the first alignment, since the word order is more similar. The method requires no other pre-processing such as part-of-speech tagging or parsing. We report improved Bleu scores for English-to-German and English-to-Swedish translation. We also examined the effect on word alignment quality and found that the reordering method increased recall while lowering precision, which partly can explain the improved Bleu scores. A manual evaluation of the translation output was also performed to understand what effect our reordering method has on the translation system. We found that where the system employing reordering differed from the baseline in terms of having more words, or a different word order, this generally led to an improvement in translation quality.

We describe the LIU systems for English-German and German-English translation in the WMT09 shared task. We focus on two methods to improve the word alignment: (i) by applying Giza++ in a second phase to a reordered training corpus, where reordering is based on the alignments from the first phase, and (ii) by adding lexical data obtained as high-precision alignments from a different word aligner. These methods were studied in the context of a system that uses compound processing, a morphological sequence model for German, and a part-of-speech sequence model for English. Both methods gave some improvements to translation quality as measured by Bleu and Meteor scores, though not consistently. All systems used both out-of-domain and in-domain data as the mixed corpus had better scores in the baseline configuration.

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ASLA är Svenska föreningen för tillämpad språkvetenskap. När ASLA och dess internationella och överordnade organisation AlLA (Association Internationate de Lingui stique Appliquee) kom till, tolkade man begreppet "tillämpad språkvetenskap" på ett sätt som nu håller på att bli omodernt. Man tänkte sig att den teoretiska lingvistiken med dess beskrivningar av språkstrukturen på olika plan (fonologi , grammatik, lexikologi, semantik etc.) var en sorts abstrakt modell av vad man kan när man behärskar ett språk. De som då studerade hur man använder, tillägnar sig, undervisar i eller översätter mellan språk, sysslade med att söka tillämpa de lingvistiska teorierna på dessa skilda områden. Den tillämpade språkvetenskapens förklaringar skulle, enli gt detta synsätt, härledas från lingvistikens modeller, eventuellt kompletterade med sociologiska, psykologiska eller pedagogiska hjälpteorier.

Detta tillämpningstänkande kan naturligtvis fortfarande ha sina poänger i specifika sammanhang. Men de som idag arbetar med att utforska, beskriva och förklara språkliga praktiker utgår oftast från att språkanvändningen i tal, samtal, skrivande, lyssnande och läsande inte kan förstås främst, ännu mindre enbart, som en tillämpning av språkliga regler. Det handlar i stället om kognitiva och kommunikativa verksamheter som har en annan natur. Dessa verksamheter ingår i psykologiska, sociala och kulturella processer och kontexter som kräver en annan teoriram än den som ger en exklusiv prioritet åt det språkstrukturella. Man behöver helt enkelt en teori (eller flera olika sorters teorier) för språkliga praktiker, som utgår från verksamheterna, interaktionerna, samtalen och texterna som primära analysenheter, inte som sekundära i relation till abstrakta strukturer. Den moderna "tillämpade" språkvetenskapen arbetar med bl.a. sådana perspektiv på sina olika problemområden.

Det har därför förefallit oss konsekvent att som tema för 1997 års ASLA-symposium välja "Samtal och textanvändning i professionerna". Många moderna professioner har just samtal och textpraktiker som karaktäristiska inslag. Det kan gälla jurister, läkare, sköterskor, logopeder, socialarbetare, kuratorer, lärare, rådgivare, personalutvecklare, marknadsförare, ombudsmän och förhandlare, översättare, och många andra. De använder språk på speciella sätt i samtal och texter inom och mellan sina professioner, och i kontakterna med klienter, kunder och lekmän av olika slag. "Discourse and the Professions" är namnet på en ny AlLA-kommission, som syftar till att bl. a. fungera som forum för forskning om sådana språkliga verksamheter. (Kommissionen har f.ö. startats på initiativ av Britt-Louise Gunnarsson.) För oss i Linköping och särskilt på tema K känns det särskilt naturligt att välja det ovannämnda temat, eftersom vi under årens lopp sökt bidra till just denna forskning (se t.ex. ASLA-Information, 21:3, 1995). Forskningen finns emellertid generellt väl representerad på många institutioner i Sverige och i övriga Norden. Det sistnämnda förhållandet har vi velat uppmärksamma genom att som plenartalare inbjuda Deirdre Boden (Köpenhamn), Lars Sigfred Evensen (Trondheim) och Anssi Peräkylä (Helsingfors).

I denna volym publiceras 19 av de 21 föredragen vid ASLA:s årsmöte i Linköping 6-7 november 1997. Föredragen av Deirdre Boden och Hans Strand saknas. De problemområden som främst kommit att representeras är kommunikation i vården och inom organisationer och företag. I övrigt uppmärksammas bl.a. sådana språkprofessioner som översättare och lärare (även om Lars Sigfred Evensens bidrag sätter elevernas texter i centrum).

ASLA:s årsmöte understöddes ekonomiskt av tema Kommunikation. Organisationskommittén bestod förutom av mig själv av Lars Ahrenberg och Linda Jönsson, som också fungerat som medutgivare av denna volym, samt Charlotte Lodens, som vi tackar för organisatorisk hjälp och praktisk redigering av volymen.

Linköping i oktober 1998

Per Linell