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Introduction on the PAROLE project
LE-PAROLE project (MLAP/LE2-4017) aims to offer a large-scale harmonised set of "core" corpora and lexica for all European Union languages.
Language corpora and lexica were built according to the same design and composition principles, in the period 1996-1998.
The harmonisation with respect to corpus composition (selection of corpus texts) was to be achieved by the obligatory application of common parameters for time of production and classification according to publication medium. No texts older than 1970 were allowed. As for publication medium, the corpus had to include specific proportions of texts from the categories "Book", "Newspaper", "Periodical" and "Miscellaneous" within a settled range.
The harmonisation effort also applied to the textual and linguistic encoding of the language corpora involved. With respect to the mark up of text structure and primary data, every single corpus text was to be encoded according to the PAROLE DTD, which is compatible with the DTD of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and with that of the Corpus Encoding Standard (CES). The level of encoding was set to Level 1 of the CES, implying the encoding of text structure and textual features up to Paragraph Level, with the additional constraint, however, that all legacy data was kept.
As for linguistic corpus annotation, an equal proportion of the corpus texts (up to 250,000 running words) was to be morphosyntactically annotated according to a common core PAROLE tagset, extended with a set of language specific features. The checking of the tags was split in two: 50,000 words had to be checked for maximum granularity and 200,000 for part-of-speech (PoS) only.
The languages involved in PAROLE corpora are: Belgian French, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, French, Finnish, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese and Swedish.
The lexica (20,000 entries per language) were built conform to a model based on EAGLES guidelines and GENELEX results, underlying a common lexical tool adapted from the EUREKA-GENELEX project. This software tool was extended to support the PAROLE model and conversion and management processes of the resulting resources.
The languages involved in PAROLE lexica are: Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portugese, Spanish and Swedish.
For more information on the LE-PAROLE project, visit the following Web sites:
http://www2.echo.lu/langeng/projects/le-parole/summary.html
http://www.linglink.lu/le/projects/le-parole/index.html