Angela Costa

Also published as: Ângela Costa


2016

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A study on the production of collocations by European Portuguese learners
Ângela Costa | Luísa Coheur | Teresa Lino
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Multiword Expressions

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Building a Corpus of Errors and Quality in Machine Translation: Experiments on Error Impact
Ângela Costa | Rui Correia | Luísa Coheur
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

In this paper we describe a corpus of automatic translations annotated with both error type and quality. The 300 sentences that we have selected were generated by Google Translate, Systran and two in-house Machine Translation systems that use Moses technology. The errors present on the translations were annotated with an error taxonomy that divides errors in five main linguistic categories (Orthography, Lexis, Grammar, Semantics and Discourse), reflecting the language level where the error is located. After the error annotation process, we accessed the translation quality of each sentence using a four point comprehension scale from 1 to 5. Both tasks of error and quality annotation were performed by two different annotators, achieving good levels of inter-annotator agreement. The creation of this corpus allowed us to use it as training data for a translation quality classifier. We concluded on error severity by observing the outputs of two machine learning classifiers: a decision tree and a regression model.

2014

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JUST.ASK, a QA system that learns to answer new questions from previous interactions
Sérgio Curto | Ana C. Mendes | Pedro Curto | Luísa Coheur | Ângela Costa
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

We present JUST.ASK, a publicly available Question Answering system, which is freely available. Its architecture is composed of the usual Question Processing, Passage Retrieval and Answer Extraction components. Several details on the information generated and manipulated by each of these components are also provided to the user when interacting with the demonstration. Since JUST.ASK also learns to answer new questions based on users’ feedback, (s)he is invited to identify the correct answers. These will then be used to retrieve answers to future questions.

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Translation errors from English to Portuguese: an annotated corpus
Angela Costa | Tiago Luís | Luísa Coheur
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

Analysing the translation errors is a task that can help us finding and describing translation problems in greater detail, but can also suggest where the automatic engines should be improved. Having these aims in mind we have created a corpus composed of 150 sentences, 50 from the TAP magazine, 50 from a TED talk and the other 50 from the from the TREC collection of factoid questions. We have automatically translated these sentences from English into Portuguese using Google Translate and Moses. After we have analysed the errors and created the error annotation taxonomy, the corpus was annotated by a linguist native speaker of Portuguese. Although Google’s overall performance was better in the translation task (we have also calculated the BLUE and NIST scores), there are some error types that Moses was better at coping with, specially discourse level errors.

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El-WOZ: a client-server wizard-of-oz interface
Thomas Pellegrini | Vahid Hedayati | Angela Costa
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

In this paper, we present a speech recording interface developed in the context of a project on automatic speech recognition for elderly native speakers of European Portuguese. In order to collect spontaneous speech in a situation of interaction with a machine, this interface was designed as a Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) plateform. In this setup, users interact with a fake automated dialog system controled by a human wizard. It was implemented as a client-server application and the subjects interact with a talking head. The human wizard chooses pre-defined questions or sentences in a graphical user interface, which are then synthesized and spoken aloud by the avatar on the client side. A small spontaneous speech corpus was collected in a daily center. Eight speakers between 75 and 90 years old were recorded. They appreciated the interface and felt at ease with the avatar. Manual orthographic transcriptions were created for the total of about 45 minutes of speech.

2013

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Meet EDGAR, a tutoring agent at MONSERRATE
Pedro Fialho | Luísa Coheur | Sérgio Curto | Pedro Cláudio | Ângela Costa | Alberto Abad | Hugo Meinedo | Isabel Trancoso
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

2012

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An English-Portuguese parallel corpus of questions: translation guidelines and application in SMT
Ângela Costa | Tiago Luís | Joana Ribeiro | Ana Cristina Mendes | Luísa Coheur
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

The task of Statistical Machine Translation depends on large amounts of training corpora. Despite the availability of several parallel corpora, these are typically composed of declarative sentences, which may not be appropriate when the goal is to translate other types of sentences, e.g., interrogatives. There have been efforts to create corpora of questions, specially in the context of the evaluation of Question-Answering systems. One of those corpora is the UIUC dataset, composed of nearly 6,000 questions, widely used in the task of Question Classification. In this work, we make available the Portuguese version of the UIUC dataset, which we manually translated, as well as the translation guidelines. We show the impact of this corpus in the performance of a state-of-the-art SMT system when translating questions. Finally, we present a taxonomy of translation errors, according to which we analyze the output of the automatic translation before and after using the corpus as training data.

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Dealing with unknown words in statistical machine translation
João Silva | Luísa Coheur | Ângela Costa | Isabel Trancoso
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

In Statistical Machine Translation, words that were not seen during training are unknown words, that is, words that the system will not know how to translate. In this paper we contribute to this research problem by profiting from orthographic cues given by words. Thus, we report a study of the impact of word distance metrics in cognates' detection and, in addition, on the possibility of obtaining possible translations of unknown words through Logical Analogy. Our approach is tested in the translation of corpora from Portuguese to English (and vice-versa).