Status report UNL02 French team

UNL evangelisation: papers (1) [1]Boitet C. (2002) Advantages of the UNL language and format for web-oriented crosslingual applications. Proc. Seminar on linguistic meaning representation and their applications over the World Wide Web, Penang, 19-21/8/02, USM/UTMK, E. K. Tang ed., 4 p. [2]Boitet C. & Tsai W.-J. (2002) Coedition to share text revision across languages. Proc. COLING-02 WS on MT, Taipeh, 1/9/2002, 8 p. [3]Boitet C. (2002) The translation of examples, citations, definitions and glosses in the Papillon project. Proc. Papillon-02 seminar on multilingual lexical data bases, Tokyo, /7/02, NII, M. Mangeot ed., 10 p. [4]Boitet C., Mangeot M. & Sérasset G. (2002) The PAPILLON project: cooperatively building a multilingual lexical data-base to derive open source dictionaries & lexicons. Proc. LREC-02 (International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation), Las Palmas, 26-31/5/2002, A. Zampolli & I. Prodanoff ed., 7 p. (accepté) [5]Boitet C. (2002) A rationale for using UNL as an interlingua and more in various domains. Proc. LREC-02 First International Workshop on UNL, other Interlinguas, and their Applications, Las Palmas, 26-31/5/2002, ELRA/ELDA, J. Cardeñosa ed., pp [6]Lafourcade M. & Boitet C. (2002) UNL Lexical selection with conceptual vectors. Proc. LREC-02 (International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation), Las Palmas, 26-31/5/2002, A. Zampolli & I. Prodanoff ed., vol. VI/VI, pp

UNL evangelisation: papers (2) [7]Blanc É. & Sérasset G. (2001) From Graph to Tree: Processing UNL Graphs using an Existing MT System. Proc. The first UNL open Conference, Suzhou, China, November 2001, UNDL. [8]Sérasset G. & Mangeot-Lerebours M. (2001) Papillon Lexical Database Project: Monolingual Dictionaries & Interlingual Links. Proc. NLPRS-2001, NII, Tokyo, November 2001, pp [9]Blanc É. (2001) An interactive hypertextual environment for MT training. Proc. MT Summit VIII, Workshop on Teaching Machine Translation, Santiago de Compostela, Sept. 2001, European Association for Machine Translation (c/o ISSCO), M. L. Forcada, J. A. Perez-Ortiz & D. R. Lewis ed., pp [10]Boitet C. (2001) Die Zukunft der maschinellen Uebersetzung von Texten und gesprochenen Dialogen. Vier technische und organizatorische Schlüssel, um mehr Sprachen zu behandeln und die Qualität zu verbessern. Proc. 2. Hungarian Humboldt Conference, Budapest, 16-18/11/2001, Humboldt association, 8 p. (texte en anglais, transparents en allemand) [11]Tsai W.-J. (2001) An introduction to UNL (Universal NEtworking Language). Proc. 22nd Verein der Chinesen (Taiwanesen) in Deutschland für Forschung und Lehre (VCTDFL), Strasbourg, France, 1-4 Nov. 2001, Verein der Chinesen (Taiwanesen) in Deutschland für Forschung und Lehre (VCTDFL).

UNL evangelisation: papers (3) [12]Tsai W.-J. (2001) SWIIVRE- a web site for the Initiation, Information, Validation, Research and Experimentation on UNL (Universal Networking Language). Proc. First UNL Open Conference - Building Global Knowledge with UNL, Suzhou, China, Nov. 2001, GETA, CLIPS, IMAG, G. UNDL ed., 8 p. [13]Boitet C. (2001) À propos de la traduction automatique. La TILV (Tribune Internationale des Langues Vivantes) 30 (2001), pp [14]Boitet C. (2001) Machine Translation. In "Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science", Nature Publishing Group, London, 24 (manuscript form) p. (à paraître) [15]Tomokiyo M., Al-Assimi A.-B. & Boitet C. (2001) Multilingual documents management by using Universal Networking Language UNL on Alignment Gestion Tool OGA. Proc. PACLING'01, Fukuoka, 11-14/9/2001, H. Sakaki ed., 7 p.

UNL evangelisation: actions Drawing new members to UNL –Malay (Zarin & Tang, USM, Penang) –Vietnamese (Phan, IT, Da Nang) Introducing reference/usage of UNL –Papillon project: reference to UWs, graphs Scientific promotion –Seminars: TALN-02, LREC-02, SSLMR-02, COLING-02

Current state of affairs (1) Almost no external funding UNL project: %, %, 1999 some trips French bodies (MEA, SFERE): 2000 some trips No success in about 12 proposals to the UE… but the tide seems about to change Internal funding from our lab Our own work: server, deconverter, enconverter, SWIIVRE Student work: masters & BA levels, ling. & CS Some money from other projects

Current state of affairs (2) Deconverter available on server 50,000 UW connected to French lemmas (KB unavailable) In case of unknown UW, the development environment puts all in the Ariane-tree and gets quite good results But the server is behind and still chooses the first possible French lemma (from HW) Work on enconverter has begun 1 Ph.D. tries to use data-driven methods E. Blanc does it with the rule-based method SWIIVRE web site offers some services Information about available UNL-LLL servers Multilingual deconversion Graphical edition of UNL-trees

Example of deconversion LUniversité des Nations Unies est une organisation internationale académique des Nations Unies et rend compte à lassemblée générale des Nations Unies et à la conférence générale de lUNESCO. sa mission est que des problèmes globaux urgent? qui sont les responsabilités des Nations Unies et de ses états membres soient abordés. lUNU apporte ensemble pour remplir sa mission la contribution duniversitaires de pays développés et en voie de développement et dinstitutions. Il fonctionne par un réseau dun centre de recherche de formation (un ) ou dun programme de recherche et de formation (un RTP). la structure de lUNU comprend (un tableau est vu) des corps constituants suivants. le conseil duniversité fixe des principes et des politiques pour luniversité. le président présent est Jairam_Reddy. le académique et administratif général de luniversité est le responsable avec la responsabilité de la direction de son programme global et dune organisation et dune administration. le recteur présent est H_van_Ginkel. le assiste bien que les relations bien que les relations et de luniversité de dans le développement global et un et une coordination et des activités. la conférence dun directeur (une ) rassemble les directeurs des et des et il est appelé pour des programmes dune recherche qui est entreprise discuter et évaluer et le est assister dans lamélioration de programmes présents.

Current development

The dictionary server is finished –Multithread server –Data is indexed by an AVL The deconversion server is operational since 2001 –Multithread server –Reentrant flex/bison for the validation of inputs –Able to treat whole UNL-html documents –But is now lagging behind the development environment

Improvements available (2000-) Extension of the UNL dictionary model –A tree may be specified for a UW translation –This allows the translation of UWs like : cookie(fld>internet) --> témoin de connection Possibility to translate texts using UWs like "United Nation Board of Directors(…)" …even though these UWs seem to go against the spirit of UNL! (but see proposals for encoding them)

Available deconverters Servers (accordint to SWIIVRE-UNL robot) –Brasilian portuguese (on UNDL site) –French –Italian –Russian –Spanish –No more available: Arab, Indonesian, Thai Chinese: no deconversion site, but downloadable deconverter for Windows Never available (never gave a working url) –English, German, Hindi, Japanese, Mongolian

Perspectives of UNL-FR (1/2) Finding funds for concrete projects and developments very hard! –already 12 unsuccessful proposals to the EU see J.Cardeñosa's paper at LREC-02 –participation in PCRD-6 proposals Finding and funding permanent linguistshard! –S. Helme for 6 months in 2002, again 6 months in 2003 (from another project!) –E. Blanc retired in Nov but continues his research on UNL actively

Perspectives of UNL-FR (2/2) Continuing to work with local resources –Linguistic students for development/debugging of DeCo-FR –CS students working on parts of the server –WJ Tsai (Ph.D. student) works on "UNL usage/usability web site" interactive improvement of UNL-graphs from any (target) language by "text-graph coedition"

4 suggestions for UNLP 2 suggestions from the Geneva 2001 meeting –Let UNLP develop like the W3C –Start group(s) for ENGLISH big obstacle to prepare UNL-related projects who many? at least 1 in Europe, 1 in the US… 2 new suggestions –XML-ify the UNL format Officially for a "minimal" format equivalent to UNL-html (we may start from Tsai WJ's proposal) Guidelines for buildingspecialized UNL xml tags & attributes –Continue to get scientific respectability New presence of UNLP in public forums: GOOD! Will lead to more competent & "free" contributions