21.1298, FYI: Corpus release: Le Petit Prince in UNL

Wed Mar 17 13:56:51 UTC 2010

LINGUIST List: Vol-21-1298. Wed Mar 17 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.1298, FYI: Corpus release: Le Petit Prince in UNL

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1)
Date: 15-Mar-2010
From: Ronaldo Martins < r.martins at undlfoundation.org >
Subject: Corpus release: Le Petit Prince in UNL

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:52:02
From: Ronaldo Martins [r.martins at undlfoundation.org]
Subject: Corpus release: Le Petit Prince in UNL

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The UNDL Foundation has released a version in UNL of "Le Petit Prince" (The
Little Prince), the famous novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, published
in 1943. The corpus is available under an Attribution Share Alike
(CC-BY-SA) Creative Commons license at the UNLarium
(http://www.unlweb.net/unlarium), and may be used for researchers and
developers interested in semantic annotation of natural language texts. 

What is UNL?

The UNL is a knowledge representation language that has been used for
several different tasks in natural language engineering, such as machine
translation, multilingual document generation, summarization, information
retrieval and semantic reasoning. It has been originally proposed by the
Institute of Advanced Studies of the United Nations University, in Tokyo,
and has been currently promoted by the UNDL Foundation, in Geneva,
Switzerland, under a mandate of the United Nations. [read more about UNL in
http://www.unlweb.net/wiki/index.php/Introduction_to_UNL]

Why Le Petit Prince?

Le Petit Prince is one of the best-selling books ever (more than 80 million
copies), and has been translated to more than 180 languages, providing thus
the possibility of contrasting and evaluating a wide range of UNL-based
translations. Additionally, the text offers the chance of experimenting UNL
in three situations that have not been explored so often: French original,
narrative and literature. Our main goal is to "UNL-plicate" the text in at
least three different directions: replication, summarization and
simplification, in as many languages as possible. [read more about
UNLplication in http://www.unlweb.net/wiki/index.php/UNLplication]

How the text was UNLized?

The integral version of Le Petit Prince, which has been released under
public domain in Canada, was obtained from
http://wikilivres.info/wiki/Le_Petit_Prince. The whole text comprises
15,513 word forms (tokens) and 1,684 sentences. The UNLization of the text
was carried out in a fully-manual way through the UNL Editor, a graph-based
authoring tool developed by the UNDL Foundation. The sentences have been
divided into two main different groups: a) the training corpus, which
comprises the first 53 sentences of the book (dedication and first
chapter), including the title; and b) the application corpus, which
comprises the remaining 1,548 sentences. The training corpus was addressed
collectively by a group of four human UNLizers in order to synchronize and
normalize the UNLization strategies. The application corpus was organized
according to the similarity of sentences (and not to the order of
appearance) and was addressed from December 2009 to February 2010 according
to the guidelines resulting from the training exercise (and which are
available at http://www.unlweb.net/wiki/index.php/UNLization_Guidelines). 

Further information

For further information, please contact 
Ronaldo MARTINS (mailto:r.martins at undlfoundation.org)
Language Resources Manager
UNDL Foundation
48, route de Chancy, CH-1213, Petit-Lancy, Geneva, Switzerland 
+41 22 879 8090

About

The UNDL Foundation (http://www.undlfoundation.org) is a non-profit
organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, which has received, from the
United Nations, the mandate for implementing the Universal Networking
Language (UNL). The UNL Programme is a collaborative effort to create
natural language resources and technology to reduce language barriers and
strengthen cross-cultural communication in the framework of the United
Nations. Participation in the Programme is free and open to individuals and
institutions, either as researchers or as developers. Special funds are
available for some languages. 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics

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