Linguistic Resources and Technologies for Romanian Language

This paper revises notions related to Language Resources and Technologies (LRT), including a brief overview of some resources developed worldwide and with a special focus on Romanian language. It then describes a joined Romanian, Moldavian, English initiative aimed at developing electronically coded resources for Romanian language, tools for their maintenance and usage, as well as for the creation of applications based on these resources

Using a Large Set of EAGLES-compliant Morpho-Syntactic Descriptors as a Tagset for Probabilistic Tagging

The paper presents one way of reconciling data sparseness with the requirement of high accuracy tagging in terms of fine-grained tagsets. For lexicon encoding, EAGLES elaborated a set of recommendations aimed at covering multilingual requirements and therefore resulted in a large number of features and possible values. Such an encoding, used for tagging purposes, would lead to very large tagsets. For instance, our EAGLES-compliant lexicon required a set of about 1000 morpho-syntactic description codes (MSDs) which after considering some systematic syncretic phenomena, was reduced to a set of 614 MSDs. Building reliable language models (LMs) for this tagset would require unrealistically large training data (hand annotated/validated). Our solution was to design a hidden reduced tagset and use it in building various LMs. The underlying tagger uses these LMs to tag a new text in as many variants as LMs are available. The tag differences between these variants are processed by a combiner which chooses the most likely tags. In the end, the tagged text is subject to a conversion process that maps the tags from the reduced tagset onto the more informative tags from the large tagset. We describe this processing chain and provide a detailed evaluation of the results