[Corpora-List] Encoding of apostrophes and ... CLEANEVAL ADVANCED WARNING

[Adam Kilgarriff]

            ===============================================
                     ADVANCE WARNING: CLEANEVAL
            ===============================================

We agree fully with John Sowa's and others' comments about the difficulty 
of getting to a good "plain text" from an arbitrary web page.

Moreover, we believe it is critical to progress in NLP.  On this list, we 
don't need to rehearse the argument that more data gives better results.  
The obvious place to go for 'more data' is usually the web.  But if the web 
text is dirty, everything suffers.  So, we need to get good at cleaning 
web text.

Under the auspices of SIGWAC (ACL SIG on Web as Corpus) we are planning a 
shared task / competitive evaluation on text cleaning - CLEANEVAL. 

We are planning to work on English and Chinese.  If others are interested 
in contributing, particularly by organising a task for some other language, 
and/or find these questions provocative:

     1. what tools do you need to convert a terabyte of data for
        language X into a BNC?
     2. how do we know when we have succeeded?

then do join the brand new cleaneval mailing list

http://devel.sslmit.unibo.it/mailman/listinfo/sigwac 

	CLEANEVAL Co-Ordinators
		Marco Baroni
		Adam Kilgarriff
		Serge Sharoff

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On
Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: 04 July 2006 21:13
To: Corpora List
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Encoding of apostrophes and quotes

All this variability in how people use apostrophes and
punctuation of any kind proves one very important point:
no matter how systematic, expressive, and logical any
system of encoding or tagging may be, people are going
to do whatever they damn well please.

Anybody who has ever tried to parse ordinary NL prose --
even supposedly well-edited prose -- knows that punctuation
is highly unreliable.  It's useful to consider it, but
only as one among many possibly contradictory sources of
information about the structure of a text.

Tagging a text correctly (according to some set of rules)
is harder than punctuating it correctly.  If people aren't
very good at punctuation, I seriously doubt that they'll
be any better at tagging.

John Sowa