This paper presents a linguistic analysis of a corpus of messages written in Catalan and Spanish, which come from several informal newsgroups on the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia; henceforth, UOC) Virtual Campus. The surrounding environment is one of extensive bilingualism and contact between Spanish and Catalan. The study was carried out as part of the INTERLINGUA project conducted by the UOC's Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). Its main goal is to ascertain the linguistic characteristics of the e‐mail register in the newsgroups in order to assess their implications for the creation of an online machine translation environment. The results shed empirical light on the relevance of characteristics of the e‐mail register, the impact of language contact and interference, and their implications for the use of machine translation for CMC data in order to facilitate cross‐linguistic communication on the Internet.

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In this paper we report on the participation of the MERALI system to the Se-mEval Task 2 Subtask 1. The MER-ALI system approaches conceptual similarity through a simple, cognitively inspired , heuristics; it builds on a linguistic resource, the TTCS E , that relies on Babel-Net, NASARI and ConceptNet. The linguistic resource in fact contains a novel mixture of common-sense and encyclope-dic knowledge. The obtained results point out that there is ample room for improvement , so that they are used to elaborate on present limitations and on future steps.

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