The Trilingual ALLEGRA Corpus: Presentation and Possible Use for Lexicon Induction Yves Scherrer, Bruno Cartoni Department of Linguistics, University of Geneva, Switzerland fyves.scherrer, [email protected] Abstract In this paper, we present a trilingual parallel corpus for German, Italian and Romansh, a Swiss minority language spoken in the canton of Grisons. The corpus called ALLEGRA contains press releases automatically gathered from the website of the cantonal administration of Grisons. Texts have been preprocessed and aligned with a current state-of-the-art sentence aligner. The corpus is one of the first of its kind, and can be of great interest, particularly for the creation of natural language processing resources and tools for Romansh. We illustrate the use of such a trilingual resource for automatic induction of bilingual lexicons, which is a real challenge for under-represented languages. We induce a bilingual lexicon for German-Romansh by phrase alignment and evaluate the resulting entries with the help of a reference lexicon. We then show that the use of the third language of the cor- pus – Italian – as a pivot language can improve the precision of the induced lexicon, without loss in terms of quality of the extracted pairs. Keywords: trilingual parallel corpora, lexicon induction, under-represented languages, Romansh. 1. Introduction duction approach and the corresponding results, while Sec- tion 6 discusses the extensions made by using Italian as a Under-represented languages are a real challenge for Nat- pivot language. We conclude in Section 7. ural Language Processing. The lack of textual and lexical resources make constructing linguistic tools even harder. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting a trilin- 2. The Romansh Language in Switzerland gual parallel corpus containing an under-represented lan- guage, and by using this corpus to induce a bilingual lexi- Romansh is a minority language spoken in South-Eastern con. Switzerland, in the canton of Grisons. The linguistic situ- The first part of this paper is dedicated to the trilingual par- ation of this canton is very diverse, as a result of a moun- allel corpus for German, Italian and Romansh, a Swiss mi- tainous topography that hindered communication across the nority language. It consists of sentence-aligned press re- valleys for a long time (Haiman and Beninca, 1992; Liver, leases from the Grisons cantonal administration. It is called 1999). The canton of Grisons is officially trilingual, with the ALLEGRA corpus. German-speaking, Italian-speaking and Romansh-speaking In the second part, we illustrate the possible use of this cor- regions. Thus, the administration of the canton publishes pus for lexicon induction. Indeed, bilingual lexicons are a most of its documents in all three languages, although in valuable resource for many Natural Language Processing practice, the primary working language is German. tasks, but are not readily available for under-represented Romansh covers a group of Romance languages, tradition- languages like Romansh. We start by inducing a bilingual ally spoken in the alpine valleys of Grisons. Since the mid- lexicon for German-Romansh from the ALLEGRA corpus, dle of the 20th century, there are no more monolingual adult with the help of a phrase alignment tool. The resulting lex- Romansh speakers. All speakers learn and use German (and icon is evaluated by comparison with a reference lexicon. Swiss German dialects) in school and in their everyday life We then extend the lexicon induction approach to take outside of their native valley. advantage of the third language of ALLEGRA, namely There are five major varieties (idioms) of Romansh in Italian. Concretely, we induce a German-Italian lexicon use today, spoken in different regions of the canton of from the German-Italian pair of the corpus and an Italian- Grisons, with a total of 32 000 native speakers: Sursil- Romansh lexicon from the Italian-Romansh one. We com- van (17 000 speakers), Sutsilvan (1000 speakers), Surmiran bine these by transitivity to build a German-Romansh lex- (3000 speakers), Puter (5000 speakers) and Vallader (6000 icon. In turn, this transitive lexicon is intersected with the speakers). Each of these idioms has its own writing con- directly induced lexicon to filter out some noise. The inter- ventions and its own local dialectal varieties. Besides these sected lexicon is shown to obtain higher precision than the five “natural” idioms, a sixth language, called Rumantsch directly induced lexicon, with no loss in quality. Grischun, has been created in the 1980s (Schmid, 1989). The paper is structured as follows: We start by giving some Rumantsch Grischun is intended as a supraregional written linguistic and sociolinguistic facts about Romansh in Sec- language for administrative and medial usage. It has been tion 2. In Section 3, we present the ALLEGRA corpus and designed as a compromise between the five idioms. Since explain how it has been created. The remainder of the paper 2005, it is taught in some Romansh schools. deals with bilingual lexicon induction. Section 4 presents From a Natural Language Processing perspective, little the methodology and the resources used to evaluate the work has been done on Romansh. An ongoing project induced lexicons. Section 5 details the direct lexicon in- aims to make the Crestomazia Retorumantscha, a large 2890 Year DE IT RM Common DE Die Bundner¨ Regierung hat in einem Schreiben 1997 182 11 12 9 an den Dachverband Swiss Olympic ihr Interesse 1998 169 150 150 145 bekundet, eine Kandidatur fur¨ Olympische Win- 1999 157 131 130 129 terspiele voranzutreiben. 2000 208 167 171 167 IT In una lettera a destinazione dell’associazione 2001 234 158 171 155 mantello Swiss Olympic, il Governo grigionese 2002 238 162 168 141 ha manifestato il proprio interesse nel portare 2003 169 112 113 97 avanti una candidatura per i Giochi Olimpici in- 2004 137 100 97 85 vernali. 2005 161 136 135 126 RM En ina brev a la federaziun da tetg ”associaz- 2006 211 171 173 164 iun olimpica svizra” ha la regenza grischuna fatg 2007 201 146 144 138 manifesta` ses interess da preparar ina candidatura 2008 197 167 168 163 per gieus olimpics d’enviern. 2009 175 175 175 174 2010 184 182 184 182 Figure 1: Example of an aligned sentence in all three lan- 2623 1968 1991 1875 guages. Table 1: Number of press releases per language (DE = Ger- written in German and translated to Rumantsch Grischun man, IT = Italian, RM = Rumantsch Grischun). The last and Italian. They are intended for a large audience and do column shows the number of press releases available in all not contain much specialized language. three languages. ALLEGRA resembles the CLE corpus (Streiter et al., 2004) for German, Italian and Ladin. Ladin is a group of idioms Words Sentences closely related to Romansh and spoken in adjacent North- DE-RM DE 799 576 49 964 ern Italy. The “Monitor” subcorpus of CLE also contains RM 1 012 111 documents produced by local and regional administrations. DE-IT DE 651 726 39 812 The ALLEGRA corpus was prepared as follows: IT 796 380 IT-RM IT 786 404 39 337 • All documents were downloaded, cleaned and con- RM 818 351 verted to plain text format. • Only documents available in the three languages were Table 2: Numbers of sentences and words in the sentence- kept. aligned files per language pair. • Until 2009, the different language versions of a docu- ment were not linked. This linkage was added manu- collection of historic texts, digitally available.1 The lan- ally on the basis of the release date and the title of the guage conservation agency Lia Rumantscha publishes a ref- document. erence German-Romansh dictionary (Pledari Grond, see Section 4.2) and also leads efforts to localize commonly • All documents were sentence-aligned with a standard used software. This lack of linguistic tools and resources alignment tool (Gale and Church, 1993). for contemporary Romansh was one of the main motiva- tions for building the ALLEGRA corpus presented in the Table 1 shows the number of original documents. The following section. statistics of the sentence-aligned corpus are given in Ta- ble 2. An example of an aligned sentence in the three lan- 3. The ALLEGRA Corpus: a Trilingual guages is given in Figure 1. The corpus is available for 3 Corpus with an Under-Represented download in raw and sentence-aligned formats. Possible uses of trilingual corpora are numerous in NLP- Language related tasks, particularly when they include an under- The ALLEGRA corpus is a new language resource for Ru- represented language. In the following, we show how such mantsch Grischun. It takes the form of a sentence-aligned resources can be exploited to improve the automated con- trilingual corpus consisting of press releases in the three stitution of bilingual lexicons. official languages of the canton of Grisons (its name is the acronym for “ALigned press reLEases of the GRisons Ad- 4. Bilingual Lexicon Induction by Phrase ministration”; allegra also means ‘hello’ in Romansh). The Alignment web site of the Grisons administration2 gives access to all 4.1. Related Work press releases since 1997. Most of these releases have been In statistical machine translation, bilingual word correspon- 1See http://www.crestomazia.ch. The Crestomazia dences are commonly induced by finding word alignments project is led by Prof. Jurgen¨ Rolshoven and Prof. Wolfgang in parallel corpora. While the initial models aligned single Schmitz (University of Cologne). 2http://www.gr.ch 3http://www.latl.unige.ch/allegra 2891 source words with single target words (Brown et al., 1993; 4.3. Stemming Och and Ney, 2003), they have been subsequently extended The main issue for evaluation is that the reference lexicon to allow longer segments of words on the source and target contains lemmatized forms, while the induced phrase tables sides.