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The Documents

As mentioned earlier, the complexity of the alignment task is very dependent on the type of text. Using exclusively Hansard documents would probably have greatly simplified the task of assembling the BAF, not only because these texts are typically fairly easy to align, but also because they are widely available in plain-text format. However, we felt that concentrating one a single genre would make the corpus less useful as an evaluation resource. So, when selecting the pairs of documents that make up the BAF, we tried to include documents from various sources and of various genres.

Of course, the corpus is, to some extent, representative of the types of texts that are available in multilingual versions. For instance, it does not contain such things as newspaper articles or e-mail messages simply because such texts are usually not translated. On the other hand, documents produced by international organizations or governments of countries with two or more official languages are usually easy to find in multilingual versions, and so the BAF contains a lot of these. This is also true, although maybe to a lesser extent, of some technical documents, such as user's manuals, and of literary text. In general, scientific articles are not routinely translated, but as part of a Canadian government-owned research institution, we found that we had access to a number of bilingual technical reports. This explains their presence in the BAF.

The documents that currently make up the BAF corpus are presented in Table 1.


 
Table 1: BAF Documents
Genre Reference Source
Institutional Hansard - Canadian Parliamentary Proceedings. March 14, 1994 House of Commons publication service.
  Supreme court of Canada (1995). Terrence Wayne Burlingham v. Her Majesty the Queen Centre de recherche en droit public of the Law Faculty of the University of Montreal.
  UN International Labor Organization (1985). 241st and 242nd Reports of the Committee on Freedom of Association ECI Multilingual Corpus.
  UN (1993). Report of the Secretary-General on the Work of the Organization UN translation services.
Scientific Geoffroy, Catherine (1994). Les technologies de communication de l'information et les aîné(e)s. CITI technical report All these documents were available as technical reports at the CITI.
  Lapointe, François (1995). Changement technologique et organisation du travail. CITI technical report  
  Macklovitch, Elliott (1995), Peut-on vérifier automatiquement la cohérence terminologique? in Actes des IVes journées scientifiques, Lexicommatique et Dictionnairiques, Lyon, France  
  Simard, Michel (1995), Réaccentuation automatique de textes français, CITI technical report  
Technical Xerox Corporation, ScanWorX User's Guide ECI Multilingual Corpus. Note : these documents contain in appendix a relatively large glossary of terms, which could not be aligned, because the order of the entries is completely different in French and English.
Literary Verne, Jules. De la terre à la lune The original French version was obtained from the WWW site of the Association des Bibliophiles Universels. The English translation comes from the Project Gutenberg.
 



next up previous
Next: File Formats Up: The BAF: A Corpus Previous: The Alignment Protocol
Michel Simard
4/24/1998