🚀 go-pugleaf

Sorry to bother you all, just letting you know that  the
ICS's CD of the Hansard "Parallel French-English Corpus"
has arrived,  this is millions of sentences of parallel
text, including more than the earlier Bellcore release,
and I know a number of you had been talking about this.  Email
me for info!
-dan


Forwarded message:
> 
>       The Hansard Corpus of Parallel English and French
> 
> 
> The Hansard Corpus consists of parallel texts in English and
> Canadian French, drawn from official records of the
> proceedings of the Canadian Parliament.  While the content is
> therefore limited to legislative discourse, it spans a broad
> assortment of topics, and the stylistic range includes
> spontaneous discussion and written correspondance along with
> legislative propositions and prepared speeches.
> 
> The collection presented here has been assembled by the LDC by
> way of archives from two distinct secondary sources.  Material
> from one time period of parliamentary proceedings was acquired
> through the IBM T.J.  Watson Research Center, while material
> from another period was acquired through Bell Communications
> Research Inc. (Bellcore).  The combined collection covers a
> time span from the mid-1970's through 1988, with no apparent
> duplication between the two data sources.
> 
> Aside from covering different time periods, the two archives
> have different organization, and have undergone different
> amounts and kinds of processing in being prepared as a
> parallel language resource.  In addition, the Bellcore set
> itself comprises two distinct types of data -- one appears to
> be the main parliamentary proceedings (similar in nature to
> the IBM set), while the other consists of transcripts from
> committee hearings.
> 
> The three sets have been kept distinct in this publication, and each
> is described in greater detail in separate documentation files on the
> CD-ROM.
> 
> In terms of what the three sets have in common:
> 
>  - They are rendered here using the 8-bit ISO-Latin1 character
> encoding standard.
> 
>  - They use a minimal amount of SGML tagging to identify
> sentences or paragraphs.
> 
>  - All sets are organized using a parallel file structure, in
> which the content of a given English text file is matched by
> the content of a corresponding French text file.
> 
>  - The SGML text files for the IBM and the Bellcore
> committee-hearings data are published in compressed form,
> using the public-domain GNU-Zip utility (gzip).  The Bellcore
> main-session files are not compressed.
> 
> In terms of differences between the three sets:
> 
>  - The IBM collection is presented as a sequence of parallel
> sentences (there are nearly 2.87 million parallel sentence
> pairs in the set).
> 
>  - The Bellcore data are presented as sequences of paragraphs.
> 
>  - The Bellcore main-session data is accompanied by mapping
> files that provide computed paragraph alignments and
> word-token correspondences; no additional alignment data are
> provided for the Bellcore committee texts (and none are needed
> for the IBM sentences).
>