[Intro to NLP, CMPSCI 585, Fall 2014]

Please turn this in via Moodle.

Version 1 (for native English speakers): Consider the following sentence:

These lies are like their father that begets them; gross as a mountain, open, palpable.
Henry IV, Part 1, act 2, scene 2

Translate this sentence into some dialect of modern vernacular English. For example, you might translate it into the style of a New York Times article, or teenagers using Twitter, or anything else.

Version 2 (for native speakers of other languages): Translate the following sentence into your native language.

One night my friend Tom, who had just moved into a new apartment, saw a cockroach scurrying about in the kitchen.

For either version,

1. Describe how you did the translation: What steps did you perform? In what order did you do them? Which steps took the most time?
2. Could you write a program that would translate using the same methods that you did? Why or why not?
3. What aspects were hardest for you? Would they be hard for a MT system?
4. What aspects would be hardest for a MT system? Are they hard for people too?
5. Which models are best for describing various aspects of your process (direct, transfer, interlingua or statistical)?

From J&M 2ed, exercise 25.3