Proceedings Of The Lrec 2020 13th Workshop On Building And Using Comparable Corpora

Proceedings of the LREC 2020 13th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora

Building and Using Comparable Corpora for Multilingual Natural Language Processing

This book provides a comprehensive overview of methods to build comparable corpora and of their applications, including machine translation, cross-lingual transfer, and various kinds of multilingual natural language processing. The authors begin with a brief history on the topic followed by a comparison to parallel resources and an explanation of why comparable corpora have become more widely used. In particular, they provide the basis for the multilingual capabilities of pre-trained models, such as BERT or GPT. The book then focuses on building comparable corpora, aligning their sentences to create a database of suitable translations, and using these sentence translations to produce dictionaries and term banks. Then, it is explained how comparable corpora can be used to build machine translation engines and to develop a wide variety of multilingual applications.

Multiword expressions

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a challenge for both the natural language applications and the linguistic theory because they often defy the application of the machinery developed for free combinations where the default is that the meaning of an utterance can be predicted from its structure. There is a rich body of primarily descriptive work on MWEs for many European languages but comparative work is little. The volume brings together MWE experts to explore the benefits of a multilingual perspective on MWEs. The ten contributions in this volume look at MWEs in Bulgarian, English, French, German, Maori, Modern Greek, Romanian, Serbian, and Spanish. They discuss prominent issues in MWE research such as classification of MWEs, their formal grammatical modeling, and the description of individual MWE types from the point of view of different theoretical frameworks, such as Dependency Grammar, Generative Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Lexicon Grammar.