Discourse-level Annotation over Europarl for Machine Translation: Connectives and Pronouns

Abstract

This paper describes methods and results for the annotation of two discourse-level phenomena, connectives and pronouns, over a multilingual parallel corpus. Excerpts from Europarl in English and French have been annotated with disambiguation information for connectives and pronouns, for about 3600 tokens. This data is then used in several ways: for cross-linguistic studies, for training automatic disambiguation software, and ultimately for training and testing discourse-aware statistical machine translation systems. The paper presents the annotation procedures and their results in detail, and overviews the first systems trained on the annotated resources and their use for machine translation.