Approach and Methodology

At the outset of the project, the consortium will undertake to analyse, test and extend the SGML-based recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) on real - size data, and gradually develop encoding conventions specifically suited to multi- lingual corpora and the needs of NLP and MT corpus-based research. To manipulate large quantities of such texts, the partners will develop conventions for tool construction and use them to build a range of highly language-independent, atomic and extensible software tools.

These specifications will be the basis for the development of two major software resources, namely (a) tools for the linguistic annotation of texts (e.g., segmenters, morphological analysers, part of speech disambiguators, aligners,, prosody taggers and post-editing tools), and (b) tools for the exploitation of annotated texts (e.g., tools for indexing, search and retrieval, statistics). This software will be implemented under UNIX, while its specific properties should facilitate portability to other systems. Moreover, it will be integrated by means of a common user interface into a text corpus manipulation system expected to provide the basic functionality needed in academic or industrial corpus research.

By using the emerging software tools, the consortium plans to produce a substantial multilingual corpus, including parallel texts and spoken data, in six EC languages (English, French, Spanish, part of speech, alignment of parallel texts, and speech prosody. All markup will have to comply to the TEI-based corpus encoding conventions established within the project. The corpus will also serve as a testbed for the project tools and a resource for future tool development and evaluation.

An application programming interface will facilitate the coupling of the progressively refined software and data components with several existing language application systems or prototypes. In particular, the industrial partners plan to develop extraction software for lexical and terminological information to complement and improve their Terminology Management, Information Retrieval or Machine Translation systems. Some effort will also be devoted to a prototypical application for testing and comparing successive versions of a Machine Translation system.

Explotation and Future Prospects

Text-oriented methods and software tools have become to be of primary interest to the NLP community. It is therefore expected that the availability of basic multi- lingual tools and date will improve and extend R&D across a wide range of disciplines, including not only the various areas of NLP (language understanding and generation, translation, etc.), but also fields such as speech technology, language learning, lexicography and lexicology, literary and linguistic computing, information retrieval, etc. By feeding the results into several commercial applications systems/prototypes, the project is expected to show the potential of state-of-the-art methods in corpus linguistics for improving industrially relevant language systems and services.

By interacting with prominent research organisations and initiatives inside and outside the EC, it is hoped that MULTEXT's approach receives the attention of a wider international forum. In a longer term perspective, it can be anticipated that this project will strengthen the methodological and technological foundations for the uniform representation, annotation and exploitation of textual information.

Partners

Associated Partners