BOWKER, the world's leading provider of bibliographic information, released statistics on English-language book publishing. According to Bowker, publishers in the English-speaking countries released 375,000 new books in 2004. Adult fiction and literary criticism accounted for 18 per cent of all new English-language books, an increase of 21 per cent over 2003. The percentage of education books experienced declines. There were only 14,440 new translations.
Computers 'speak' in sentences
美国推出最新语言识别及学习系统
RESEARCHERS from Cornell University in the US and Tel Aviv University in Israel have developed a computer programme that can scan text in a number of languages, including English and Chinese, and infer the underlying rules of grammar. The rules can be used to generate new and meaningful sentences. The development offers insights into language acquisition because it discovers complex patterns in raw text by repeatedly aligning sentences and looking for overlapping parts.
