NL and Speech in the MULTEXT Project

MULTEXT is the largest project funded under the LRE Program, intended to contribute to the development of generally usable software tools to manipulate and analyse multi-lingual text and speech, and to annotate multi-lingual text and speech corpora with structural and linguistic markup. It will attempt to establish conventions for the encoding of such corpora, building on and contributing to the preliminary recommendations of the relevant international and European standardization initiatives. MULTEXT will also work towards establishing a set of guidelines for linguistic software development, which will be widely published in order to enable future development by others. The place of speech in the overall project is intended to explore the possibilities of integrating NL and speech processing by attempting to harmonize tools and methods from both areas. MULTEXT will focus on phenomena at the intersection of the two domains, in particular prosody, whose supra-segmental nature invites research into the complex relationships it holds with morphology and syntax.