FreeLing 3.0: Towards Wider Multilinguality

FreeLing is an open-source multilingual language processing library providing a wide range of analyzers for several languages. It offers text processing and language annotation facilities to NLP application developers, lowering the cost of building those applications. FreeLing is customizable, extensible, and has a strong orientation to real-world applications in terms of speed and robustness. Developers can use the default linguistic resources (dictionaries, lexicons, grammars, etc.), extend/adapt them to specific domains, or –since the library is open source– develop new ones for specific languages or special application needs. This paper describes the general architecture of the library, presents the major changes and improvements included in FreeLing version 3.0, and summarizes some relevant industrial projects in which it has been used.Postprint (published version

Workshop on Advanced Technologies for Planetary Instruments, part 1

This meeting was conceived in response to new challenges facing NASA's robotic solar system exploration program. This volume contains papers presented at the Workshop on Advanced Technologies for Planetary Instruments on 28-30 Apr. 1993. This meeting was conceived in response to new challenges facing NASA's robotic solar system exploration program. Over the past several years, SDIO has sponsored a significant technology development program aimed, in part, at the production of instruments with these characteristics. This workshop provided an opportunity for specialists from the planetary science and DoD communities to establish contacts, to explore common technical ground in an open forum, and more specifically, to discuss the applicability of SDIO's technology base to planetary science instruments

An Enhancement Method for Japanese-English Automated Translation

We present a method for improving existing statistical machine translation methods using a knowledge base compiled from a bilingual corpus as well as sequence alignment and pattern matching techniques from the area of machine learning and bioinformatics. An alignment algorithm identifies similar sentences, which are then used to construct a better word order for the translation. Our preliminary test results indicate a significant improvement of the translation quality.

Towartds Computer-aided Editing of Scientific and Technical Texts

The paper discusses facilities of computer systems for editing scientific and technical texts, which partially automate functions of human editor and thus help the writer to improve text quality. Two experimental systems LINAR and CONUT developed in 90s to control the quality of Russian scientific and technical texts are briefly described; and general principles for designing more powerful editing systems are pointed out. Features of an editing system being now under development are outlined, primarily the underlying linguistic knowledge base and procedures controlling the text

A Domain Specific Lexicon Acquisition Tool for Cross-Language Information Retrieval

With the recent enormous increase of information dissemination via the web as incentive there is a growing interest in supporting tools for cross-language retrieval. In this paper we describe a disclosure and retrieval approach that fulfils the needs of both information providers and users by offering fast and cheap access to large amounts of documents from various language domains. Relevant information can be retrieved irrespective of the language used for the specification of a query. In order to realize this type of multilingual functionality the availability of several translation tools is needed, both of a generic and a domain specific nature. Domain specific tools are often not available or only against large costs. In this paper we will therefore focus on a way to reduce these costs, namely the automatic derivation of multilingual resources from so-called parallel text corpora. The benefits of this approach will be illustrated for an example system, i.e. the demonstrator developed within the project Twenty-One, which is tuned to information from the area of sustainable development

Proceedings of the COLING 2004 Post Conference Workshop on Multilingual Linguistic Ressources MLR2004

International audienceIn an ever expanding information society, most information systems are now facing the "multilingual challenge". Multilingual language resources play an essential role in modern information systems. Such resources need to provide information on many languages in a common framework and should be (re)usable in many applications (for automatic or human use). Many centres have been involved in national and international projects dedicated to building har- monised language resources and creating expertise in the maintenance and further development of standardised linguistic data. These resources include dictionaries, lexicons, thesauri, word-nets, and annotated corpora developed along the lines of best practices and recommendations. However, since the late 90's, most efforts in scaling up these resources remain the responsibility of the local authorities, usually, with very low funding (if any) and few opportunities for academic recognition of this work. Hence, it is not surprising that many of the resource holders and developers have become reluctant to give free access to the latest versions of their resources, and their actual status is therefore currently rather unclear. The goal of this workshop is to study problems involved in the development, management and reuse of lexical resources in a multilingual context. Moreover, this workshop provides a forum for reviewing the present state of language resources. The workshop is meant to bring to the international community qualitative and quantitative information about the most recent developments in the area of linguistic resources and their use in applications. The impressive number of submissions (38) to this workshop and in other workshops and conferences dedicated to similar topics proves that dealing with multilingual linguistic ressources has become a very hot problem in the Natural Language Processing community. To cope with the number of submissions, the workshop organising committee decided to accept 16 papers from 10 countries based on the reviewers' recommendations. Six of these papers will be presented in a poster session. The papers constitute a representative selection of current trends in research on Multilingual Language Resources, such as multilingual aligned corpora, bilingual and multilingual lexicons, and multilingual speech resources. The papers also represent a characteristic set of approaches to the development of multilingual language resources, such as automatic extraction of information from corpora, combination and re-use of existing resources, online collaborative development of multilingual lexicons, and use of the Web as a multilingual language resource. The development and management of multilingual language resources is a long-term activity in which collaboration among researchers is essential. We hope that this workshop will gather many researchers involved in such developments and will give them the opportunity to discuss, exchange, compare their approaches and strengthen their collaborations in the field. The organisation of this workshop would have been impossible without the hard work of the program committee who managed to provide accurate reviews on time, on a rather tight schedule. We would also like to thank the Coling 2004 organising committee that made this workshop possible. Finally, we hope that this workshop will yield fruitful results for all participants