Toward Communicating Simple Sentences Using Pictorial Representations

This paper addresses and evaluates the hypothesis that pictorial representations can be used to effectively convey simple sentences across language barriers. The paper makes two main contributions. First, it proposes an approach to augmenting dictionaries with illustrative images using volunteer con...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Machine translation 2008-09, Vol.22 (3), p.153-173
Main Authors: Mihalcea, Rada, Leong, Chee Wee
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied linguistics
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Linguistics
Computer Science
Dictionaries
Language
Language translation
Linguistics
Machine translation
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Pictorial representation
Sentence generation
Sentences
Symbolism
Translation
Verbs
Words
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Summary:This paper addresses and evaluates the hypothesis that pictorial representations can be used to effectively convey simple sentences across language barriers. The paper makes two main contributions. First, it proposes an approach to augmenting dictionaries with illustrative images using volunteer contributions over the Web. The paper describes the PicNet illustrated dictionary, and evaluates the quality and quantity of the contributions collected through several online activities. Second, starting with this illustrated dictionary, the paper describes a system for the automatic construction of pictorial representations for simple sentences. Comparative evaluations show that a considerable amount of understanding can be achieved using visual descriptions of information, with evaluation figures within a comparable range of those obtained with linguistic representations produced by an automatic machine translation system.
ISSN:0922-6567
1573-0573
DOI:10.1007/s10590-009-9050-0