Synthesis By Rule as a Tool for Phonological Research
The phonologist, having analysed a corpus of phonetic data and proposed tentative phonological rules, must test these rules by generating novel utterances for acceptance or rejection by an informant. There are certain methodological problems in such testing which could be avoided by the use of speech synthesized by rule. Synthesis by rule is now a practical technique, and a synthesis-by-rule system at Haskins Laboratories has been used to formulate rules for General American English.
Building on old foundations : From phonemic theory to C/V-segregation
This paper aims at showing that the scope of structural phonemics transcends the limits of the 'foundations of phonology', contrary to what is tacitly assumed and appears from some textbooks. It will be argued that the classical concept phoneme, defined as a set of distinctive features, presents both obsolete and still relevant properties. One of these properties, linearity, should clearly be abandoned, as follows from acoustic-perceptual evidence as well as from some types of sound change. Thereby, the phoneme in its purest sense can be said to have been superseded by one major trend characterizing post-SPE phonological theory: multilinearity. However, a phoneme-based property of distinctive features, their locality, is still valid, and is empirically supported by cross-linguistic variation. Now, locality and non-linearity are apparently contradictory. It will be shown that this contradiction cannot be resolved, and that both feature properties cannot be captured, unless consonants and vowels are assumed to be universally segregated within phonological representations. This issue leads to several predictions on C/C and V/V interactions, converges with independent processual evidence like vowel-to-vowel assimilation, and addresses the question of the relationship between phonology and morphology.
MT and the Swiss language service providers: an analysis and training perspective
Switzerland is perceived as a highly multilingual country, with four national languages and a solid translation tradition in official, administrative and corporate settings, now even extended to include English. A research case study was set up to investigate the understanding and use of translation and language technologies by Swiss language service providers. This paper highlights some findings, particularly focusing upon the issue of translation automation processes in multilingual documentation production, with a view not only to spot preconceptions or knowledge gaps about MT, but also to 
suggest some training principles. We will argue that training activities ought to present MT systems as 
key aiding components of translator workbenches and, their output, as a valid linguistic resource for further human refining, if necessary. Moreover, in line with the idea that MT can be part and parcel of multilingual content production cycles, we will look at the interaction of MT with controlled language, CAT tools and terminology work. In sum, we will make explicit the usefulness of MT against the 
widespread prejudice that investing in MT does not return any benefits given the ‘low and hilarious quality of its output’, as quoted by most of the interviewees of our case study.