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.
http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:AD1
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