Louise Esher


2020

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Building a Universal Dependencies Treebank for Occitan
Aleksandra Miletic | Myriam Bras | Marianne Vergez-Couret | Louise Esher | Clamença Poujade | Jean Sibille
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper outlines the ongoing effort of creating the first treebank for Occitan, a low-ressourced regional language spoken mainly in the south of France. We briefly present the global context of the project and report on its current status. We adopt the Universal Dependencies framework for this project. Our methodology is based on two main principles. Firstly, in order to guarantee the annotation quality, we use the agile annotation approach. Secondly, we rely on pre-processing using existing tools (taggers and parsers) to facilitate the work of human annotators, mainly through a delexicalized cross-lingual parsing approach. We present the results available at this point (annotation guidelines and a sub-corpus annotated with PoS tags and lemmas) and give the timeline for the rest of the work.

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A Four-Dialect Treebank for Occitan: Building Process and Parsing Experiments
Aleksandra Miletic | Myriam Bras | Marianne Vergez-Couret | Louise Esher | Clamença Poujade | Jean Sibille
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects

Occitan is a Romance language spoken mainly in the south of France. It has no official status in the country, it is not standardized and displays important diatopic variation resulting in a rich system of dialects. Recently, a first treebank for this language was created. However, this corpus is based exclusively on texts in the Lengadocian dialect. Our paper describes the work aimed at extending the existing corpus with content in three new dialects, namely Gascon, Provençau and Lemosin. We describe both the annotation of initial content in these new varieties of Occitan and experiments allowing us to identify the most efficient method for further enrichment of the corpus. We observe that parsing models trained on Occitan dialects achieve better results than a delexicalized model trained on other Romance languages despite the latter training corpus being much larger (20K vs 900K tokens). The results of the native Occitan models show an important impact of cross-dialectal lexical variation, whereas syntactic variation seems to affect the systems less. We hope that the resulting corpus, incorporating several Occitan varieties, will facilitate the training of robust NLP tools, capable of processing all kinds of Occitan texts.

2019

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Building a treebank for Occitan: what use for Romance UD corpora?
Aleksandra Miletic | Myriam Bras | Louise Esher | Jean Sibille | Marianne Vergez-Couret
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2019)