PhD thesis - School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh

Chapter 6. Other Potential Applications 173
clear strategy for making this decision. He argues that non-adapted anglicisms should
be entered into general dictionaries or lexicons if they occur above a certain frequency
in a large and balanced corpus. The English inclusion classifier would be a useful
tool in this context. It could be constantly run over new documents, thereby allowing
lexicographers to identify new loan words, possibly even trace them, and determine
the frequency of a certain loan word over time. The English inclusion classifier can
consequently make lexicographers aware of a language mixing phenomenon that they
might otherwise miss during their corpus analysis. Equally, lexicographers could feed
their knowledge back into the classifier as a way of improving its performance. In
this way, the classifier would allow lexicographers to base their decisions to include
a term in the dictionary based on empirical facts, and, conversely, the lexicographers’
knowledge could be exploited to increase the performance of the classifier.
6.4 Chapter Summary
This chapter described in detail the usefulness of English inclusion detection for var-
ious applications and fields, including TTS, MT and linguistics and lexicography. As
with parsing, input to TTS and MT systems is generally assumed to be monolingual
and so far there has been little focus on devising systems that are able to process mixed-
lingual input sentences. In our increasingly globalised world where English is infiltrat-
ing many other languages, automatic natural language processing must be able to deal
with such language mixing. The English inclusion classifier could be used in a pre-
processing stage in order to signal where language changes occur. Further processing
of English inclusions then depends on various synthesis or translation strategies for
specific cases. This chapter reviewed previous work on deriving such strategies and
presented some ideas for future work in terms of extrinsically evaluating the benefit of
English inclusion detection for both applications.
Regarding the fields of linguistics and lexicography, this chapter summarised the
benefits of the English inclusion classifier as a tool for automating synchronic and di-
achronic language analysis. As such, the classifier could be beneficial to linguists who
examine the frequency of certain expressions at a given point in time, or in different do-
mains, and who track language changes over time. Moreover, it could be used to assist
lexicographers in their decisions to include specific terms into lexicons or dictionaries.