Parallel Corpora, Alignment Technologies and Further Prospects in Multilingual Resources and Technology Infrastructure

Multilingual technologies, which to a large extent are language independent, provide a powerful support for easier building of annotated linguistic resources for languages where such resources are scarce or missing. All these technologies require parallel corpora in order to achieve their ends. Parallel texts encode extremely valuable linguistic knowledge because the linguistic decisions made by the human translators in order to faithfully convey the meaning of the source text can be traced and used as evidence on linguistic facts which, in a monolingual context, might be unavailable to or overlooked by a computer program. In this paper we will briefly present some underlying multilingual technologies and methodologies we developed for exploiting parallel corpora and we will discuss their relevance for cross-linguistic annotation transfer and applications.