sing both in
classical symbolic methods as well as in newer probabilist methods.

Thanks to the Incognito laboratory, which was founded in 1983, the University of
Montreal's Computer Science and Operational Research Department (DIRO)
established itself as a leading research centre in the area of natural language
processing. In June 1997, Industry Canada agreed to transfer to the DIRO all the
activities of the machine-aided translation program (TAO), which had been
conducted at the Centre for Information Technology Innovation (CITI) since 1984.
A new laboratory -- the RALI -- was opened in order to promote and develop the
results of the CITI's research, allowing the members of the former TAO team to
pursue their work within the university community. The RALI's areas of expertise
include work in: automatic text alignment, automatic text generation, automatic
reaccentuation, language identification and finite state transducers.

The RALI produces the "TransX family" of what it calls "a new generation" of
translation support tools (TransType, TransTalk, TransCheck and TransSearch),
which are based on probabilistic translation models that automatically calculate
the correspondences between the text produced by a translator and the original
source language text.

" TransType speeds up the keying-in of a translation by anticipating a
translator's choices and critiquizing them when appropriate. In proposing its
suggestions, TransType takes into account both the source text and the partial
translation that the translator has already produced.

TransTalk is an automatic dictation system that makes use of a probabilistic
translation model in order to improve the performance of its voice recognition
model.

TransCheck automatically detects certain types of translation errors by
verifying that the correspondences between the segments of a draft and the
segments of the source text respect well-known properties of a good translation.

TransSearch allows translators to search databases of pre-existing translations
in order to find ready-made solutions to all sorts of translation problems. In
order to produce the required databases, the translations and the source
language texts must first be aligned."

Some of RALI's other projects are:

- the SILC Project, concerning language identification. When a document is
submitted to the system, SILC attempts to determine what language the document
is written in and the character set in wh