next up previous
Next: Background Up: The BAF: A Corpus Previous: The BAF: A Corpus

Introduction

The BAF[*]is a corpus of English and French bitext: it consists of pairs of English and French documents, which are translations of one another, and whose sentences have been aligned. The corpus was produced by researchers at the CITI, a Canadian government research laboratory, as part of their contribution to the ``Action de recherche concertée'' (ARC) A2, a cooperative research project initiated and financed by the AUPELF-UREF. The CITI's machine-aided translation program has since been handed over to the University of Montreal's RALI laboratory, where we continue working on the BAF. We have recently made version 1.1 of the corpus available to the research community. It can be obtained from the RALI, through its World Wide Web server, at URL http://www-rali.iro.umontreal.ca.

While such bilingual corpora are now quite common, what distinguishes the BAF from other bitexts is that the alignments were entirely done by hand. As a result, the corpus can be used as a reference to evaluate and compare the performance of various automatic alignment techniques.

The greater part of the corpus is made up of ``institutional'' texts: debates of the Canadian parliament (Hansards), court transcripts and UN reports; but we have also included some scientific, technical and literary documents. In all, the corpus contains approximately $400\
000$ words in each language.

In this paper, we discuss why this corpus was assembled, how it was produced, and what it contains. We also describe some of the computer tools that were developed and used in the process, and which we have also made available.


next up previous
Next: Background Up: The BAF: A Corpus Previous: The BAF: A Corpus
Michel Simard
4/24/1998