Dictionarium Valachico-Latinum, the first original bilingual lexicon in Romanian

Dictionarium Valachico-Latinum, a text written in the Banat–Hunedoara area in the mid-17th century, holds a special place among the old Romanian lexicographic works. This first original dictionary of the Romanian language, most probably conceived for the presentation of a representative corpus of the Romanian language vocabulary through Latin equivalents, was the first such work to use the Latin model of organization and presentation of selected words. Following the same Latin model, the author of the text, who proved to have a very good command of the Romanian language, both in its literary and spoken version, created graphemes for rendering sounds specific to the Romanian language and recommended forms and spellings, as an incipient form of establishing literary norms and as a way of lexicographic organization.

L’élaboration d’un dictionnaire bilingue des valeurs mobilières

As of today, one cannot find, in Canada, a dictionary totally dedicated to securities. The concept of securities refers to a large sphere that includes preferred shares and partnerships, as well as fraud and broker dealers. This paper will analyze the making of a bilingual dictionary of securities through four different steps: 1-the literature on the subject; 2-the nomenclature; 3-the microstructure; 4-the bilingual lexicon and the medium. At each of these steps, the following objectives will be followed: first, to compile the Canadian terminology which applies to securities; second, to offer to researchers, translators and professionals a lexicographical tool that is complete and useful; and third, to take into account, if need be, the legal aspects of the terms defined.

Plan Optimization to Bilingual Dictionary Induction for Low-resource Language Families

Creating bilingual dictionary is the first crucial step in enriching low-resource languages. Especially for the closely related ones, it has been shown that the constraint-based approach is useful for inducing bilingual lexicons from two bilingual dictionaries via the pivot language. However, if there are no available machine-readable dictionaries as input, we need to consider manual creation by bilingual native speakers. To reach a goal of comprehensively create multiple bilingual dictionaries, even if we already have several existing machine-readable bilingual dictionaries, it is still difficult to determine the execution order of the constraint-based approach to reducing the total cost. Plan optimization is crucial in composing the order of bilingual dictionaries creation with the consideration of the methods and their costs. We formalize the plan optimization for creating bilingual dictionaries by utilizing Markov Decision Process (MDP) with the goal to get a more accurate estimation of the most feasible optimal plan with the least total cost before fully implementing the constraint-based bilingual lexicon induction. We model a prior beta distribution of bilingual lexicon induction precision with language similarity and polysemy of the topology as and parameters. It is further used to model cost function and state transition probability. We estimated the cost of all investment plans as a baseline for evaluating the proposed MDP-based approach with total cost as an evaluation metric. After utilizing the posterior beta distribution in the first batch of experiments to construct the prior beta distribution in the second batch of experiments, the result shows 61.5% of cost reduction compared to the estimated all investment plans and 39.4% of cost reduction compared to the estimated MDP optimal plan. The MDP-based proposal outperformed the baseline on the total cost.

Learning Japanese-English Bilingual Word Embeddings by Using Language Specificity

Cross-lingual word embeddings have been gaining attention because they can capture the semantic meaning of words across languages, which can be applied to cross-lingual tasks. Most methods learn a single mapping (e.g., a linear mapping) to transform a word embedding space from one language to another. To improve bilingual word embeddings, we propose an advanced method that adds a language-specific mapping. We focus on learning Japanese-English bilingual word embedding mapping by considering the specificity of the Japanese language. We evaluated our method by comparing it with single mapping-based-models on bilingual lexicon induction between Japanese and English. We determined that our method was more effective, with significant improvements on words of Japanese origin.

Overlapping and distinct neural networks supporting novel word learning in bilinguals and monolinguals

This study investigated how bilingual experience alters neural mechanisms supporting novel word learning. We hypothesised that novel words elicit increased semantic activation in the larger bilingual lexicon, potentially stimulating stronger memory integration than in monolinguals. English monolinguals and Spanish–English bilinguals were trained on two sets of written Swahili–English word pairs, one set on each of two consecutive days, and performed a recognition task in the MRI-scanner. Lexical integration was measured through visual primed lexical decision. Surprisingly, no group difference emerged in explicit word memory, and priming occurred only in the monolingual group. This difference in lexical integration may indicate an increased need for slow neocortical interleaving of old and new information in the denser bilingual lexicon. The fMRI data were consistent with increased use of cognitive control networks in monolinguals and of articulatory motor processes in bilinguals, providing further evidence for experience-induced neural changes: monolinguals and bilinguals reached largely comparable behavioural performance levels in novel word learning, but did so by recruiting partially overlapping but non-identical neural systems to acquire novel words.