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Contents

INGREDIENTS FOR EFFICIENCY

DOCUMENTATION AND RESEARCH

MIND MAPPING, PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND REFERENCING
1) (Not only) mind mapping
  i) What is mind mapping and what are related software good for?
  ii) Main functionalities of mind mapping tools
  iii) Using the software
  iv) Some examples of mind mapping software
2) Projects and project management
  i) What does project mean in software?
  ii) What are project management software good for?
  iii) Key elements in project management software
  iv) Using project management software
  v) Some examples of project management tools
3) Managing references and bibliography
  i) Fastidious tasks and smart solutions
  ii) Functionalities and use of reference / bibliography management tools
  iii) Some examples of bibliography/citation management tools

CREATING AND MANAGING DATABASES
1) General presentation
  i) Main functionalities of the software type
  ii) Particular software of the given type
2) Using relational databases
  i) Creating relational databases in MySQL
  ii) Using SQL queries
  iii) Graphical and online interfaces

MULTIMODAL DATA: FROM COMMUNICATION TO ANNOTATION (AND VICE VERSA)
a) On the process of annotation
b) Data analysis
i) Audio annotation
ii) Video annotation
iii) Unimodal annotation
iv) Multimodal pragmatic annotation

TOOLS FOR ANALYSING EMPIRICAL DATA: DOING PHONETICS BY COMPUTER (PRAAT)
1) General presentation
2) Functionalities of Praat

AN OVERVIEW OF MULTIMODAL CORPORA, ANNOTATION TOOLS AND SCHEMES
1) Introduction
2) The necessity of a multimodal approach in communication studies
  a) The multimodal nature of human interaction
  b) Multimodal perception
3) The definition and requirements of MM corpora
4) Annotation tools and query options related to MM corpora
  a) Annotation and querying tools
  b) Usability of datasets in novel corpus-driven research areas
5) Examples of MM corpora
  a) AMI Corpus
  b) SmartKom Corpus
  c) HuComTech Corpus
6) Standardization
7) Limitations

ANNOTATION PROCEDURES, FEATURE EXTRACTION AND QUERY OPTIONS
1) Annotation procedures
2) Feature extraction procedures after segmenting DMs
3) Automatic annotation into sounding and silent parts
4) Query options in ELAN

KEYWORD EXTRACTION: ITS ROLE IN INFORMATION PROCESSING
1) Preliminaries
2) Uses of keyword extraction
  i) Quantitative approaches
  ii) Qualitative approaches
3) Keyword extraction techniques
  i) Quantitative techniques
  ii) Qualitative techniques
4) Where are we going

TEACHING

TEACHING BY COMPUTER
1) Course Authoring and Exercise/Test Development
  i) Making automated learning and evaluative exercises
  ii) Editors for course and/or activity authoring
  iii) Some examples of course (or exercise) authoring software
2) Course (or Learning) Management Systems (CMS/LMS) or virtual learning environments (VLE)
  i) What kind of software CMSs/LMSs/VLEs are?
  ii) Main characteristics and functionalities of VLEs/CMSs/LMSs
  iii) Examples of CMS/LMS/VLE software

TRANSLATION

COMPUTERS IN TRANSLATION
1) Two (?) directions in using computer for translation
  i) Machine (or Automatic) Translation
  ii) Cases when CAT is not an animal
  iii) And why the question mark? Convergence between CAT and MT
2) Translation memory software
  i) General notions
  ii) Main functionalities of TMs
  iii) Examples of TM / CAT software
3) Machine Translation
  i) Beliefs and facts about MT
  ii) Approaches to MT
  iii) Examples of MT systems

THE AUTHORS

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Introduction

Are you just wondering how to tackle a fastidious task you are assigned to or how to realize some absolutely original idea that came to your mind? Perhaps there is already a special computer program out there responding exactly to your needs, or at least capable of making your job easier (to say nothing of tasks that are simply unrealizable manually). There are software applications for (almost) everything; you only have to look for it over the Internet. Maybe it takes some time to find the right tool and to become familiar enough with it, but it is worth the effort, unless you prefer to spend all your time on working (at a low efficiency rate, and without being sure of a consistent and faultless result). It may seem obvious, but people reluctant to learn, for instance, the use of formulas and functions in Excel, even should it cost them to work after hours regularly, are far from being an exception. Discovering new tools seems then an even bigger challenge. But let us give you an encouragement. Content management system is not much of a pleasant-sounding expression, is it? However, could anyone pretend that s/he has never used some content management system (in a broader sense of the term)? Not plausibly if s/he has ever posted a single comment on a web site, used Facebook or kept a blog. Of course, there are more demanding tasks in handling such a system, but one of its main purposes is to allow users with no knowledge about HTML, computer networks and programming to contribute to the creation of web sites and to publish contents there. Generally speaking, most of computer programs are not for informaticians, programmers and computer geeks but for simple users in need of tools for their everyday work.

As a translator, a teacher or a researcher, you will want to carry out various operations on any kind of media. Transform a photographed document into an editable text or add neatly presented syntactic trees or other graphs to your papers. Manage bi- or multilingual lists of technical terms or edit some other vocabulary or dictionary. Search for examples of how a word or a structure is employed in actual language use or compile and annotate a corpus allowing you a comprehensive analysis of (linguistic, literary, rhetorical, psycho-social, etc.) phenomena you are interested in. Realize statistical analyses of your data. Edit sound, image or video, add or edit subtitles, or convert a file from one format into another. Or anything else: it is impossible to enumerate all possible tasks that can be facilitated by some software application. The following chapters illustrate some fields of activities in which computing is a key factor. Hopefully, they will also give readers a liking for searching efficient tools for whatever kind of work they have to do.

The present volume is addressed principally to students in humanities. It was inspired by computing-related courses the authors taught in various programs at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of University of Debrecen as well as by their intention of giving undergraduate students some insight into natural language processing research activities.

As a common observation, we found that more effort should be spent on increasing computer literacy, especially in order to enable students to use computer skills for professional purposes. Obviously, there would be too many applications to be presented for a book intended to be concise. We often have to choose among a number of similar programs. Also, technology evolves at such a pace that books like this could not keep up if they would give concrete instructions on how to carry out concrete operations with concrete software. Therefore, we preferred to lay out an overview of some fields of computer applications that may be of a common interest for students in humanities.

Our book provides orientation, and aims to develop a conscious and creative attitude to use computer tools for any professional purpose, which is a basic element of this universe where self-teaching has an essential role. It is written in English, this lingua franca indispensable for understanding and utilizing the larger part of somewhat more specialized computer programs. Even though software localization has become common practice, special tools for special purposes are mostly available only in English. "Better get used to it" - or take the initiative to translate them yourself, as it is done in the case of community-developed software.

The book is composed of three chapters, according to three main activities studied in the framework of our training programs: research, teaching, and translation. The first (and longest) one encompasses all the stages of research process, from planning through organizing and data collection to analysis and preparing publications. It presents not only suitable tool types but also illustration with examples of corpus-based linguistic/pragmatic research. The second chapter deals with software-aided course authoring and exercise/test development, and resumes how, from a technical point of view, a virtual learning environment can be created and managed. The last chapter explains distinctions and convergences between computer-assisted and automatic solutions for translation, and summarizes essential facts about the latter. Definitions of basic notions as well as explanations on the computerized workflow of "industrial" translation enable the reader to understand phenomena about translation that we encounter even in everyday life.

One might ask why publication itself is not entirely covered, given the lack of a chapter on document editing and publishing tools, like word processors, the most banal instruments of each evoked activity. Text editors (just like spreadsheet or presentation editing software) are considered belonging to elementary computer literacy so that it seemed possible to us to cut corners at this point. Maybe many users are unfamiliar with some more advanced functionalities of these tools, like styles, templates, cross-reference, tables of contents, mail merge, review, track changes or comments. Might you be one of them? Well, it is time then to initiate that self-teaching procedure we have just mentioned. Otherwise, you are likely to waste endlessly your precious time on boring mechanical operations - with poor results.

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