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MULTEXT: Multilingual Text Tools and Corpora MULTEXT : Multilingual Text Tools and Corpora Nancy Ide and Jean V6ronis LABORATOIRE PAROLE ET LANGAGE CNRS & Universitd de Provence 29, Avenue Robert Schuman 13621 Aix-en-Provence Cedex 1 (France) e-mail: ide@fraixll .univ-aix. fr, veronis@fraixll .univ-aix. fr Abstract, MULTEXT (Multilingual Text "Fools and nmnipulate and analyse text corpora and to create multi- Corpora) is the largest project funded in the Commission lingual text corpora with structural and linguistic of European Communities Linguistic Research and markt, p. It will attempt to establish conventions for the Engineering Program. The project will contribute to the encoding of such corpora, building on and contributing development of generally usable software tools to to the preliminary recommendations of the relevant manipulate and analyse text corpora and to create multi- international and European standardization initiatives. lingual text corpora with structural and linguistic MULTEXT will also work towards establishing a set of markup. It will attempt to establish conventions for the guidelines for text software development, which will be encoding of such corpora, building on and contributing wklely published in order to enable future development to the preliminary recommendations of the relevant by others. The project consortimn, consisting of eight international and European standardization initiatives. academic and research institutions and six major MULTEXT will also work towards establishing a set of European industrial partners, is committed to make its guidelines for text software development, which will be results, namely corpus, related tools, specifications and widely published in order to enable future development accompanying documentation, freely and publicly by others. All tools and data developed within the project available. will be made freely and publicly available. Keywords. multi-lingual corpora, text markup, text 2. Project Overview software, corpus annotation. At the outset of the project, the consortimn will 1. Introduction undertake to analyse, test and extend the SGML-based recommendations of the TEl on real-size data, and Text-oriented methods and software tools have come to gradually devch)p encoding conventions specifically be of primary interest to the NLP community. However, suited to nmlti-lingual corpora and the needs of NLP and existing tools for natural language processing (NLP) and MT corpus-based researcb. To manipulate large machine translation (MT) corpus-based research are quantities of such texts, the partners will, in collaboration typically embedded in large, non-adaptable systems with the recently established Text Software Initiative which are fundamentally incompatible. Little effort has (TS[), develop conventions fo," tool co,~struction and use been made to develop software standards, and software tbem to build a r:mge of highly language-independent, reusability is virtually non-existent. As a result, there is a atomic and cxtensible software tools. serious lack of generally usable tools to manipulate and analyze text corpora that arc widely available for These specifications will be the basis for thc research, especially for multi-lingual al)plications. development of two major software resources, namely (a) tools for the linguistic annotation of texts (e.g. At the same time, the availability of data is hampered by segmenters, morphological analysers, part of speech a lack of well-established standards for encoding disambiguators, aligners, prosody taggers and post- corpora. Although the Text Encoding Initiativc (TEI) has editing tools), and (b) tools for the exploitation of provided guidelines for text encoding [Sper94], they arc annotated texts (e.g. tools for indexing, search and so far largely untested on real-scale data, especially retrieval, statistics). This software will be implemented multi-lingual data. Further, the TEl Guidelines offer a under UNIX, while its specific properties should broad range of text encoding solutions serving a w~riety facilitate portability to other systems. Moreover, it will of disciplines and applications, and are not intended to be integrated by means of a common user interface into a provide specific guidance for the purposes of NLP and text corpus manipulation system expected to provide the MT corpus-based research. basic functionality needed in academic or industrial corpus research. For the overall software design as well MIJLTEXT (Multilingual Text Tools and Corpora) ix a as the development of specific components, MULTEXT recently initiated large-scale project funded under tim will capitalise on the experience and, possibly, Commission of European Communities Linguistic preliminary results achieved in the ALEP project. Research and Engineering Program, which is intended to address these problems. The project will contribute to the By using the emerging software tools, the consortium development of generally usable software tools to plans to produce a substantial multilingual corpus, including parallel texts and spoken data, in six EC 588 languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and program can be de-bundled into its constituent programs, Dutch). The entire corpus will be marked for gross each consisting of small, easily understandable piece of logical and structural features; a subset of the corpus will code. MULTEXT will bundle its tools in a be marked and hand-validated for sentence and sub- comprehensive corpus-handling system, as welt as sentence features, part of speech, alignment of parallel demonstrate their use in several high-level applications, texts, and speech prosody. All markup will have to thus showing different ways in which tim "Legos" can be comply to the TEI-based corpus encoding conventions recombined in specific applications. established within the project. Tim corl)us will also serve as a tcstbed for the project tools and a resource for future • Princil/e 3: OperatotZ~'tream approach tool development and evaluation. MUI.'I'EXT will adopt the operator/stream apl)roach to An application programming iuterfime will facilitate the scfftware design, which has had widespread coupling of the progressively refined software and data implementation and use and is generally accepted in components with several existing langt, age application research and industry. In particular, it has been used systems or prototypes. In particular, the industrial increasingly in computational linguistics applications partners phm to develop extraction software fl)r lexieal (see, for instance, [I,ibe92]). The operator/stream and terminological infornmtion to complement and approach has served as the basis for the UNIX operating improve their Terminology Management, Information system, which as a result provides a ready-made platform R.etrieval or Machine Translation systems. Some effcwt for its implementation. will also be devoted to a prototypical api)lication for In the operator/stream approach, data flows in uni- testing and comparing successive versions of a Machine directional "slreams" between functions. Each of these Translation system. functions is an "operator" that translbrms the data as it passes by. Since everything is understood in terms of 3. Background and approach what goes in and what comes out, the emphasis is on what needs to be done rather than how it is done. "Fhis 3.1. Software Standard enables a focus on overall algorithms rather titan implementation details. Component functions are MULTEXT is strongly committed to "software independent, and at no point are compiled together in a reusability", to avoid the re-inventing of tim wheel and single program. This is a key point, since it means that development of largely incompatible and non-extcnsihle each operator can be implemcnted in a different software that is characteristic of much language-analytic language, developed by different people, tested research in the past three decades. Therefore, the project independently, etc. In addition, new functions can be will establish a software standard for the development of phlgged into the stream as necded, and all ft, nctions are its tools. This will enable these tools to be universally completely re-usable in other contexts. used and extended hy others. • Princil~le 4: [hrique &tta type We outline here the principles (borrowed from [IdeV93a]) nnderlying the MULTEXT approach to Commtmication between programs will be by lneaus Of software design, which enable flexibility, extendability, flat, ]roman readable streams and files, apart from well- and reusability. defined, encapsuhlted binary formats for cases such as speech signal, images, or indexes. The only data type is • Principle 1: lxmguage independence therel'tn'e the stving. There is some overhead in this The first goal is to extend existing mctlmds to otlmr ;.Ipproilch, since conversion froul string to, s'ty, nulnbcr and back is required I()r numbers that are to be European languages. So far, these methods have been manipulated arithmetically, but tim speed and storage applied almost exclusively to English. Therefore, the methods will be adapted to produce language- capacities of present-day machines virtu:ally eliminate this concern. More importantly, the use of string data independent tools, by using an engine-based approach only enables an easy test-modify-test cycle, since the where all hmguage dependent materials arc provided as data. Thus, extension of the tools to cover additional input and outi)ut of any step can be examined and languages will in most cases involve only providing
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