The Multilingual Forest Investigating High-quality Parallel Corpus Development

Abstract: This thesis explores the development of parallel treebanks, collections of language data consisting of texts and their translations, with syntactic annotation and alignment, linking words, phrases, and sentences to show translation equivalence. We describe the semi-manual annotation of the SMULTRON parallel treebank, consisting of 1,000 sentences in English, German and Swedish. This description is the starting point for answering the first of two questions in this thesis.What issues need to be considered to achieve a high-quality, consistent,parallel treebank?The units of annotation and the choice of annotation schemes are crucial for quality, and some automated processing is necessary to increase the size. Automatic quality checks and evaluation are essential, but manual quality control is still needed to achieve high quality.Additionally, we explore improving the automatically created annotation for one language, using information available from the annotation of the other languages. This leads us to the second of the two questions in this thesis.Can we improve automatic annotation by projecting information available in the other languages?Experiments with automatic alignment, which is projected from two language pairs, L1–L2 and L1–L3, onto the third pair, L2–L3, show an improvement in precision, in particular if the projected alignment is intersected with the system alignment. We also construct a test collection for experiments on annotation projection to resolve prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities. While majority vote projection improves the annotation, compared to the basic automatic annotation, using linguistic clues to correct the annotation before majority vote projection is even better, although more laborious. However, some structural errors cannot be corrected by projection at all, as different languages have different wording, and thus different structures.