How to Read All Languages: Translation Alignment with Ugarit

workshop / tutorial
Authorship
  1. 1. Chiara Palladino

    Furman University

  2. 2. Anna Zhang

    Furman University

  3. 3. Maryam Foradi

    Digital Humanities - Universität Leipzig (Leipzig University)

  4. 4. Tariq Yousef

    Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group - Universität Leipzig (Leipzig University)

Work text
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This workshop will illustrate the importance of translation alignment in the field of slow reading and language learning. We will provide a short theoretical overview on the principles of translation alignment, together with a hands-on tutorial on Ugarit (http://ugarit.ialigner.com/), a web-based translation alignment editor. Ugarit is designed as a Citizen Science tool, aiming at collecting training datasets of manually aligned words from diverse text corpora. The ultimate goal of Ugarit is to improve automatic translation alignment methods and to implement a set of dynamic lexica, with particular regard for languages with less supported infrastructures. However, the tool also has a strong pedagogical potential, which has been assessed in the course of various hands-on workshops and in an ongoing integration in school curricula: we have tested how translation alignment with Ugarit can help readers to engage with languages that they have never seen, grasping their essential semantic and morphological aspects. We propose text alignment as a way to empower the perception of the complexity of a language, but also as a method to leverage usual obstacles in the process of reading apparently “impenetrable” sources by directly engaging with them. At present, Ugarit includes aligned pairs from 36 languages (including less represented languages, like Bulgarian, Ethiopic, Sanskrit, Yiddish, and Armenian), 277 unique users, and about 23,400 parallel texts hosted.

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Conference Info

In review

ADHO - 2020
"carrefours / intersections"

Hosted at Carleton University, Université d'Ottawa (University of Ottawa)

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

July 20, 2020 - July 25, 2020

475 works by 1078 authors indexed

Conference cancelled due to coronavirus. Online conference held at https://hcommons.org/groups/dh2020/. Data for this conference were initially prepared and cleaned by May Ning.

Conference website: https://dh2020.adho.org/

References: https://dh2020.adho.org/abstracts/

Series: ADHO (15)

Organizers: ADHO