Parallel corpora are still scarce for most of the world’s language pairs. The situation is by no means different for regional languages of France. In addition, adequate web interfaces facilitate and encourage the use of parallel corpora by target users, such as language learners and teachers, as well as linguists. In this paper, we describe ParCoLab, a parallel corpus and a web platform for querying the corpus. From its onset, ParCoLab has been geared towards lower-resource languages, with an initial corpus in Serbian, along with French and English (later Spanish). We focus here on the extension of ParCoLab with a parallel corpus for four regional languages of France: Alsatian, Corsican, Occitan and Poitevin-Saintongeais. In particular, we detail criteria for choosing texts and issues related to their collection. The new parallel corpus contains more than 20k tokens per regional language.

The current situation regarding the existence of natural language processing (NLP) resources and tools for Corsican reveals their virtual non-existence. Our inventory contains only a few rare digital resources, lexical or corpus databases, requiring adaptation work. Our objective is to use the Banque de Données Langue Corse project (BDLC) to improve the availability of resources and tools for the Corsican language and, in the long term, provide a complete Basic Language Ressource Kit (BLARK). We have defined a roadmap setting out the actions to be undertaken: the collection of corpora and the setting up of a consultation interface (concordancer), and of a language detection tool, an electronic dictionary and a part-of-speech tagger. The first achievements regarding these topics have already been reached and are presented in this article. Some elements are also available on our project page (http://bdlc.univ-corse.fr/tal/).

Nos recherches sur la langue corse nous amènent naturellement à envisager l’utilisation d’outils pour le traitement automatique du langage. Après une brève introduction sur le corse et sur le projet qui constitue notre cadre de travail, nous proposons un état des lieux concernant l’application du TAL aux langues peu dotées, dont le corse. Nous définissons ensuite les actions qui peuvent être entreprises, ainsi que la manière dont elles peuvent s’intégrer dans le cadre de notre projet, afin de progresser vers la constitution de ressources et la construction d’outils pour le TAL corse.