Desilets, Alain wrote:
Really interesting! Can you post an HTML or text only version so I could read it using Google Translate?
I don't know a good way off hand to get that from TeX, but I'll see what I can do.
At WikiMania 07, I presented a paper that looked at how useful wiki resources like wikipedia, wiktionary and OmegaWiki might be for the needs of translators.
Oh, interesting. To bad I didn't find your publications before, I could have nicely cited them :)
One of the things we found was that in isolation, each of those resources at best covered ~30% of the translation difficulties typically encountered by professional translators for the English-French pair. But combined, they were able to cover ~50%. We also found that the presentation of information on Wikipedia and Wiktionary was not suited for the needs of translators.
I have not looked at Wiktionary. Thinking about it, I'm afraid I failed to mention my reasons for that in the thesis (losing some points there i guess). Some of the methods I used are surely applicable there too, though the pages are a bit more difficult to parse, and we quickly get into "structured record" terrioy, which i generally avoided (Auer and Lehmann did some interesting reasearch there with their DBpedia project).
Based on those two findings, we proposed the idea of a robot capable of pulling cross-lingual information from those resources and presenting in a way that is better suited for the needs of translators. Sounds like you may have just done this!
Well... I hope I did :) The aim was to automatically generate a multilingual thesaurus, which is surely a good tool for translators. However, the quality of the results are not what a translator would expect from a traditional lexicon or thesaurus. The data is probably most useful directly when used in the context of information retrieval and language processing, that is, as a basis for computers to link text to conceptual world knowledge ("common sense"). I hope however that the data I generate could be usefull to translators anyway, as an addition or extension to traditional, manually maintained dictionaries and thesauri. One point that would veryx much interest me is to try to use my work aqs a basis of building a bridge between Wikipedia and OmegaWiki.
Is there a web interface to this multilingual resource that I could try?
Sadly, no. I was planning one and started to implement it, but there was no time to get it up and running. Maybe there will be such an interface in the future. But I really see the place of my code more as a backend -- a good interface to that data may in fact be OmegaWiki, if we find a way to integrate it nicely. But I do feel the urge to provide a simple query interface to my data for testing, so maybe it'll still happen :)
Regards, Daniel