Current approaches in Digital .Humanities tend to ignore a central as-pect of any hermeneutic introspection: the intrinsic vagueness of analyzed texts. Especially when dealing with his-torical documents neglecting vague-ness has important implications on the interpretation of the results. In this pa-per we present current limitation of an-notation approaches and describe a current methodology for annotating vagueness for historical Romanian texts.

Data-driven machine translation (MT) approaches became very popular during last years, especially for language pairs for which it is difficult to find specialists to develop transfer rules. Statistical (SMT) or example-based (EBMT) systems can provide reasonable translation quality for assimilation purposes, as long as a large amount of training data is available. Especially SMT systems rely on parallel aligned corpora which have to be statistical relevant for the given language pair. The construction of large domain specific parallel corpora is time- and cost-consuming; the current practice relies on one or two big such corpora per language pair. Recent developed strategies ensure certain portability to other domains through specialized lexicons or small domain specific corpora. In this paper we discuss the influence of different discourse styles on statistical machine translation systems. We investigate how a pure SMT performs when training and test data belong to same domain but the discourse style varies.

In this paper we give an overview of Semantic Web technologies and the impact of these ones for multilingual Web. We present a possible solution for improving the quality of on-line translation systems, using mechanisms and standards from Semantic Web. We focus on Example based machine translation and the automatization of the translation examples extraction by means of RDF-repositories.

Implementation of machine translation “toy” systems is a good practical exercise especially for computer science students. Our aim in a series of courses on MT in 2002 was to make students familiar both with typical problems of Machine Translation in particular and natural language processing in general, as well as with software implementation. In order to simulate a software implementation proc- ess as realistic as possible, we introduced more than 20 evaluation criteria to be filled by the students when they evaluated their own products. The criteria go far beyond such “toy” systems, but they should demonstrate the students, what a real software evaluation means, and which are the particularities of Machine Translation Evaluation.

Most translations are needed for technical documents in specific domains and often the domain knowledge available to the translator is crucial for the efficiency and quality of the translation task. Our project1 aims at the investigation of a MAT-paradigm where the human user is supported by linguistic as well as by subject information ([vHa90], [vHAn92]). The basic hypotheses of the approach are: - domain knowledge is not encoded in the lexicon entries, i.e. we clearly distinguish between the language layer and the conceptual layer; - the representation of domain knowledge is language independent and replaces most of the semantic entries in a traditional semantic lexicon of MT/MAT-systems; - the user accesses domain information by highlighting a sequence in the source text and specifying the type of query; - factual explanations to the user should be simple and transparent although the underlying formalisms for knowledge representation and processing might be very complex; - as a language for knowledge representation, conceptual graphs (CGs) of Sowa [Sow84] were chosen. In providing connections between the terms (lexical entries) and the knowledge base our approach will be compared to terminological knowledge bases (TKBs) which are hybrid systems between concept-oriented term banks and knowledge bases. This paper presents: - a contrastive view to knowledge based techniques in MAT, - mechanisms for mapping the "ordinary" linguistic lexicon and the terminological lexicon of two languages onto one knowledge base, - methods to access the domain knowledge in a flexible way without allowing completely free linguistic dialogues, - techniques to present the result of queries to the translator in restricted natural language, and - use of domain knowledge to solve specific translation difficulties.