MULTEXT-East Morphosyntactic Specifications: Towards Version 4⋆

The MULTEXT-East standardised and linked set of language resources covers a large number of mainly Central and Eastern European languages and includes harmonised morphosyntactic resources consisting of the specifications, lexica and a parallel corpus. The MULTEXT-East resources, currently at Version 3, are freely available for research use and have been used in numerous studies connected to language technologies. In this paper we concentrate on MULTEXT-East morphosyntactic specifications, which define the features that describe word-level syntactic annotations, and explain their structure in Version 4, currently work in progress. The V4 specifications are planned to cover at least 13 languages and will be encoded in XML, according to the latest version of the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines, TEI P5. The new encoding enables more flexible language-particular encodings, localisations of feature names and codes, easy generation of derived formats (HTML, tabular, XML libraries), and simplifies the addition of new languages.