Abstract
In this paper, we introduce an ongoing project for the development of a parallel treebank for Italian, English and French. The treebank is annotated in a dependency format, namely the one designed in the Turin University Treebank (TUT), hence the choice to call such new resource Par(allel)TUT. The project aims at creating a resource which can be useful in particular for translation research. Therefore, beyond constantly enriching the treebank with new and heterogeneous data, so as to build a dynamic and balanced multilingual treebank, the current stage of the project is devoted to the design of a tool for the alignment of data, which takes into account syntactic knowledge as annotated in this kind of resource. The paper focuses in particular on the study of translational divergences and their implications for the development of the alignment tool. The paper provides an overview of the treebank, with its current content and the peculiarities of the annotation format, the description of the classes of translational divergences which could be encountered in the treebank, together with a proposal for their alignment.
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Notes
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Contrarily to work on statistical machine translation, phrase alignment in this work is intended as an alignment between linguistically motivated phrases.
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http://www.statmt.org/europarl/; the section used is ep_00_01_17.
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Namely the “Help” section, at https://www.facebook.com/help/345121355559712/.
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The section used is jrc52006DC243.
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https://wit3.fbk.eu/; we retrieved the texts used for training of MT systems, downloaded from https://wit3.fbk.eu/mt.php?release=2012-02.
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As for the sentence count, we would like to clarify that some sub-corpora, especially the UDHR, are featured by the presence of short headings (e.g. ‘Article 1’) that we did not considered for calculating the average sentence length, even if they were treated as separate sentences according to the parser segmentation criteria.
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In general, considering the sources from which the texts of ParTUT have been retrieved, it can be assumed that they are not all original, but drafted in one or more languages and then translated into the others.
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In this paper, we report examples of sentences (or fragments of sentences) in all the languages involved. The glosses for non-English examples are then provided; they are intended as literal and do not necessarily correspond to the correct English expression.
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In the Italian TUT there is a third component (omitted here and in the current ParTUT annotation) concerning the semantic role of the dependent with respect to its governor.
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The TUTtoPenn converter can be downloaded at http://www.di.unito.it/~tutreeb/TUTtoPENNconverter/.
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A semi-automatic alignment has also been performed with LF Aligner (http://sourceforge.net/projects/aligner/).
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These labels are used to identify the treebank fragment we refer to in the examples: they indicate section_language#sentencenumber.
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Since in the ParTUT texts translation direction is unknown, we consider the two transformation strategies as counterparts one of each other and put them in the same subclass, while other works rather considered them as separate categories [8]. We applied the same principle even for the cases of addition/deletion, mentioned below.
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In this example, in particular, we observe both additions and deletions while comparing the English sentence to the French version.
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Sanguinetti, M., Bosco, C. (2015). PartTUT: The Turin University Parallel Treebank. In: Basili, R., Bosco, C., Delmonte, R., Moschitti, A., Simi, M. (eds) Harmonization and Development of Resources and Tools for Italian Natural Language Processing within the PARLI Project. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 589. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14206-7_3
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