Grup d'Investigació en Lingüística Computacional - Universitat de Barcelona

Project Summary

The project has developed a set of generally usable software tools to manipulate and analyse text corpora, together with lexicons and multilingual corpora in seven European languages. It has established conventions for the encoding of corpora and harmonised specifications for computational lexicons, building on and contributing to the preliminary recommendations of the relevant international and European standardisation initiatives. All project results are freely and publicly available.

Progress and results

MULTEXT has developed the first set of publicly available large-scale resources and tools for use in corpus-based language engineering applications. The project's specific achievements fall into three areas:

Specifications

:

• Lexical specifications for seven European languages (English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish), comprising the first large-scale application of and contribution to the EAGLES work in this area,
• Specifications for encoding corpora in SGML, comprising one of the first large-scale applications of the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines and subsequently adopted by EAGLES and PAROLE,
• Specification of a data architecture for linguistic corpora, providing the first hypertext view of such corpora.

Resources

:

• The first freely available large-scale lexicons for the seven languages,
• The first freely available large-scale multilingual text corpus for the seven languages.

Tools

:

• The first language-independent, parameterisable text tokeniser,
• The first freely available modular and language-independent part-of-speech tagger,
• The first freely available text aligner,
• The first freely available complete speech workbench,
• The first public SGML query-language interpreter,
• The first set of SGML-aware corpus exploitation tools.

Start date January 1994
Duration 26 months
Total Effort ca. 350 person-months

Exploitation

Text-oriented methods and software tools have come to be of primary interest to the NLP community. It is therefore expected that the availability of basic multilingual tools and data will improve and extend R&D across a wide range of disciplines, including not only the various areas of language engineering, but also fields such as speech technology, language learning, lexicography and lexicology, information retrieval, etc. The project's methodologies and results are being used in a related project under the Copernicus programme, MULTEXT-EAST, thus extending the application to thirteen western and eastern European languages. Extensions to regional and non-European languages are also underway.

Consortium

More Information on MULTEXT

e_mail: veronis@univ-aix.fr

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