Interlingua corpora

Over the last few months, we have been moving MedSLT development towards a new way of doing things, which is based on the idea of an "Interlingua corpus". We present the basic picture in our LREC 2008 paper, but that's already somewhat out of date, and doesn't give any low-level details.

We now have four interlingua corpora, representing the cross-produce of {linear, AFF} x {plain, combined}. The linear/AFF distinction is concerned with the type of semantics used. "Linear" is the old MedSLT semantics; AFF semantics is explained in the paper by Pierrette, Beth Ann, Yukie and myself which has just been accepted for COLING 2008, and which will soon be appearing on the Geneva website.

The plain/combined distinction says what information has been incorporated in the corpus. The "plain" corpus is created by merging results of translating FROM each source language into interlingua, so each interlingua form lists the source language results that translate into it. The "combined" corpus contains all the information in the "plain" corpus, plus also the results of translating TO each target language.

At the moment, we use the plain corpus for developing translations rules that go from Interlingua to target languages. The combined corpus is used for creating help resources.

All the scripts used to build interlingua corpora are referenced in $MED_SLT2/Interlingua/scripts/Makefile.