Creating the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC): Challenges and Perspectives

The aim of this contribution is to reflect on the process of building the multilingual European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC) that is being created in the framework of the networking project Distant Reading for European Literary History funded by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). To provide some background, we briefly introduce the basic idea of ELTeC with a focus on the overall goals and intended usage scenarios. We then describe the collection composition principles that we have derived from the usage scenarios. In our discussion of the corpus-building process, we focus on collections of novels from four different literary traditions as components of ELTeC: French, Portuguese, Romanian, and Slovenian, selected from the more than twenty collections that are currently in preparation. For each collection, we describe some of the challenges we have encountered and the solutions developed while building ELTeC. In each case, the literary tradition, the history of the language, the current state of digitization of cultural heritage, the resources available locally, and the scholars’ training level with regard to digitization and corpus building have been vastly different. How can we, in this context, hope to build comparable collections of novels that can usefully be integrated into a multilingual resource such as ELTeC and used in Distant Reading research? Based on our individual and collective experience with contributing to ELTeC, we end this contribution with some lessons learned regarding collaborative, multilingual corpus building

A System Architecture to Support Cost-Effective Transcription and Translation of Large Video Lecture Repositories

[EN] Online video lecture repositories are rapidly growing and becoming established as fundamental knowledge assets. However, most lectures are neither transcribed nor translated because of the lack of cost-effective solutions that can give accurate enough results. In this paper, we describe a system architecture that supports the cost-effective transcription and translation of large video lecture repositories. This architecture has been adopted in the EU project transLectures and is now being tested on a repository of more than 9000 video lectures at the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia. Following a brief description of this repository and of the transLectures project, we describe the proposed system architecture in detail. We also report empirical results on the quality of the transcriptions and translations currently being maintained and steadily improved.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 287755. Funding was also provided by the Spanish Government with the FPU scholarship AP2010-4349.Silvestre Cerdà, JA.; Pérez González De Martos, AM.; Jiménez López, M.; Turró Ribalta, C.; Juan Císcar, A.; Civera Saiz, J. (2013). A System Architecture to Support Cost-Effective Transcription and Translation of Large Video Lecture Repositories. IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. Conference proceedings. 3994-3999. https://doi.org/10.1109/SMC.2013.682S3994399

CLARIN. The infrastructure for language resources

CLARIN, the "Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure", has established itself as a major player in the field of research infrastructures for the humanities. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the organization, its members, its goals and its functioning, as well as of the tools and resources hosted by the infrastructure. The many contributors representing various fields, from computer science to law to psychology, analyse a wide range of topics, such as the technology behind the CLARIN infrastructure, the use of CLARIN resources in diverse research projects, the achievements of selected national CLARIN consortia, and the challenges that CLARIN has faced and will face in the future. The book will be published in 2022, 10 years after the establishment of CLARIN as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium by the European Commission (Decision 2012/136/EU)

CLARIN

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – CLARIN – for the humanities. It covers a broad range of CLARIN language resources and services, its underlying technological infrastructure, the achievements of national consortia, and challenges that CLARIN will tackle in the future. The book is published 10 years after establishing CLARIN as an Europ. Research Infrastructure Consortium

CLARIN

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – CLARIN – for the humanities. It covers a broad range of CLARIN language resources and services, its underlying technological infrastructure, the achievements of national consortia, and challenges that CLARIN will tackle in the future. The book is published 10 years after establishing CLARIN as an Europ. Research Infrastructure Consortium

Statistical Machine Translation from Slovenian to English

In this paper, we analyse three statistical models for the machine translation of Slovenian into English. All of them are based on the IBM Model~4, but differ in the type of linguistic knowledge they use. Model 4a uses only basic linguistic units of the text, i.e., words and sentences. In Model 4b, lemmatisation is used as a preprocessing step of the translation task. Lemmatisation also makes it possible to add a Slovenian-English dictionary as an additional knowledge source. Model 4c takes advantage of the morpho-syntactic descriptions (MSD) of words. In Model 4c, MSD codes replace the automatic word classes used in Models 4a and 4b. The models are experimentally evaluated using the IJS-ELAN parallel corpus

Romanian Language Technology — a view from an academic perspective

The article reports on research and developments pursued by the Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence "Mihai Draganescu" of the Romanian Academy in order to narrow the gaps identified by the deep analysis on the European languages made by Meta-Net white papers and published by Springer in 2012. Except English, all the European languages needed significant research and development in order to reach an adequate technological level, in line with the expectations and requirements of the knowledge society