TEI and LMF crosswalks

The present paper explores various arguments in favour of making the Text Encoding Initia-tive (TEI) guidelines an appropriate serialisation for ISO standard 24613:2008 (LMF, Lexi-cal Mark-up Framework) . It also identifies the issues that would have to be resolved in order to reach an appropriate implementation of these ideas, in particular in terms of infor-mational coverage. We show how the customisation facilities offered by the TEI guidelines can provide an adequate background, not only to cover missing components within the current Dictionary chapter of the TEI guidelines, but also to allow specific lexical projects to deal with local constraints. We expect this proposal to be a basis for a future ISO project in the context of the on going revision of LMF

Creating Lexical Resources in TEI P5 : a Schema for Multi-purpose Digital Dictionaries

Although most of the relevant dictionary productions of the recent past have relied on digital data and methods, there is little consensus on formats and standards. The Institute for Corpus Linguistics and Text Technology (ICLTT) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences has been conducting a number of varied lexicographic projects, both digitising print dictionaries and working on the creation of genuinely digital lexicographic data. This data was designed to serve varying purposes: machine-readability was only one. A second goal was interoperability with digital NLP tools. To achieve this end, a uniform encoding system applicable across all the projects was developed. The paper describes the constraints imposed on the content models of the various elements of the TEI dictionary module and provides arguments in favour of TEI P5 as an encoding system not only being used to represent digitised print dictionaries but also for NLP purposes

From manuscript catalogues to a handbook of Syriac literature: Modeling an infrastructure for Syriaca.org

Despite increasing interest in Syriac studies and growing digital availability of Syriac texts, there is currently no up-to-date infrastructure for discovering, identifying, classifying, and referencing works of Syriac literature. The standard reference work (Baumstark's Geschichte) is over ninety years old, and the perhaps 20,000 Syriac manuscripts extant worldwide can be accessed only through disparate catalogues and databases. The present article proposes a tentative data model for Syriaca.org's New Handbook of Syriac Literature, an open-access digital publication that will serve as both an authority file for Syriac works and a guide to accessing their manuscript representations, editions, and translations. The authors hope that by publishing a draft data model they can receive feedback and incorporate suggestions into the next stage of the project.Comment: Part of special issue: Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages. 15 pages, 4 figure

Proposals for a normalized representation of Standard Arabic full form lexica

Standardized lexical resources are an important prerequisite for the development of robust and wide coverage natural language processing application. Therefore, we applied the Lexical Markup Framework, a recent ISO initiative towards standards for designing, implementing and representing lexical resources, on a test bed of data for an Arabic full form lexicon. Besides minor structural accommodation that would be needed in order to take into account the traditional root-based organization of Arabic dictionaries, the LMF proposal appeared to be suitable to our purpose, especially because of the separate management of the hierarchical data structure (LMF core model) and elementary linguistic descriptors (data categories)

Recognition of off-line printed Arabic text using Hidden Markov Models.

yesThis paper describes a technique for automatic recognition of off-line printed Arabic text using Hidden Markov Models. In this work different sizes of overlapping and non-overlapping hierarchical windows are used to generate 16 features from each vertical sliding strip. Eight different Arabic fonts were used for testing (viz. Arial, Tahoma, Akhbar, Thuluth, Naskh, Simplified Arabic, Andalus, and Traditional Arabic). It was experimentally proven that different fonts have their highest recognition rates at different numbers of states (5 or 7) and codebook sizes (128 or 256). Arabic text is cursive, and each character may have up to four different shapes based on its location in a word. This research work considered each shape as a different class, resulting in a total of 126 classes (compared to 28 Arabic letters). The achieved average recognition rates were between 98.08% and 99.89% for the eight experimental fonts. The main contributions of this work are the novel hierarchical sliding window technique using only 16 features for each sliding window, considering each shape of Arabic characters as a separate class, bypassing the need for segmenting Arabic text, and its applicability to other languages

Embedding Web-based Statistical Translation Models in Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Although more and more language pairs are covered by machine translation services, there are still many pairs that lack translation resources. Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is an application which needs translation functionality of a relatively low level of sophistication since current models for information retrieval (IR) are still based on a bag-of-words. The Web provides a vast resource for the automatic construction of parallel corpora which can be used to train statistical translation models automatically. The resulting translation models can be embedded in several ways in a retrieval model. In this paper, we will investigate the problem of automatically mining parallel texts from the Web and different ways of integrating the translation models within the retrieval process. Our experiments on standard test collections for CLIR show that the Web-based translation models can surpass commercial MT systems in CLIR tasks. These results open the perspective of constructing a fully automatic query translation device for CLIR at a very low cost.Comment: 37 page