Multilingual parallel treebanking: a lean and flexible approach

Jonas Kuhn, Michael Jellinghaus


Abstract
We propose a bootstrapping approach to creating a phrase-level alignment over a sentence-aligned parallel corpus, reporting concrete treebank annotation work performed on a sample of sentence tuples from the Europarl corpus, currently for English, French, German, and Spanish. The manually annotated seed data will be used as the basis for automatically labelling the rest of the corpus. Some preliminary experiments addressing the bootstrapping aspects are presented. The representation format for syntactic correspondence across parallel text that we propose as the starting point for a process of successive refinement emphasizes correspondences of major constituents that realize semantic arguments or modifiers; language-particular details of morphosyntactic realization are intentionally left largely unlabelled. We believe this format is a good basis for training NLPtools for multilingual application contexts in which consistency across languages is more central than fine-grained details in specific languages (in particular, syntax-based statistical Machine Translation).
Anthology ID:
L06-1386
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)
Month:
May
Year:
2006
Address:
Genoa, Italy
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Aldo Gangemi, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/629_pdf.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonas Kuhn and Michael Jellinghaus. 2006. Multilingual parallel treebanking: a lean and flexible approach. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), Genoa, Italy. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Multilingual parallel treebanking: a lean and flexible approach (Kuhn & Jellinghaus, LREC 2006)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/629_pdf.pdf