Multilingual parallel treebanking: a lean and flexible approach

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).

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