Centre for Computational Linguistics: Projects

EUROTRA

Time Span: 1982 - 1993
Commission of the European Communities &
Diensten voor de Programmatie van het Wetenschapsbeleid
Coordinators in Leuven: M. Debrock & F. Van Eynde

Eurotra had two aims: (1) to develop a prototype for machine translation between the languages of the European Community (Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish); (2) to stimulate research in computational linguistics in the EC Member States.

The project started in 1982, after four years of preparatory activities. The K.U. Leuven was involved in these activities from the start, and obtained in 1984 an Association Contract from the Commission of the European Communities, supplemented with a contract from the Belgian ``Diensten voor de Programmatie van het Wetenschapsbeleid'', a government agency for research planning.

The main tasks of the Leuven Eurotra-group concerned

• the development of the Dutch modules of the prototype (in collaboration with the Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht)
• the development of the transfer modules English --> Dutch and German --> Dutch
• research resulting in implementable linguistic specifications for common use in the project; this research has focussed on semantic and morphological topics, such as tense and aspect, determination and quantification, mood and modality, Aktionsart, compounding and derivation

On top of its Contract of Association Eurotra-Leuven obtained supplementary contracts for contributions to the development of software specifications and of a linguistic framework for the project as a whole. Both are described in the first two volumes of the series, ``Studies in Machine Translation and Natural Language Processing'', published by the Office for Official Publications of the Commission of the European Community (Luxembourg, 1991). They are a summary of the Eurotra Reference Manual, which is currently being rewritten in terms of a TFS-formalism (see the Linguistic Specifications project).

A full survey of the activities of Eurotra-Leuven can be obtained on request.

• A. Raw, B. Vandecapelle & F. Van Eynde, Eurotra: an overview, In: Interface. Journal of Applied Linguistics 3/1, 1988, pp. 5-32

• J. Durand, P. Bennett, V. Allegranza, F. Van Eynde, L. Humphreys, P. Schmidt & E. Steiner, The Eurotra Linguistic Specifications: an overview, In: Machine Translation 6, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1991, pp. 103-147

• Publications about machine translation in general
• Eurotra Working Papers

CCL

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Information Provider: Centrum voor Computerlinguïstiek
Comments to the Author: Frank.VanEynde@ccl.kuleuven.ac.be

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