Presentation of the EUROLANG project

Abstract

International trade in general and particularly the Single European Market will bring about a considerable increase in the already huge documentation market. NLP products will contribute to improving the competitiveness of industry in this strategic field.The industrial objective of EUROLANG is thus to provide efficient NLP tools and to give the European business community a better opportunity to maintain a command of multilingual technical and commercial communication.The technical objective of the EUROLANG project is to build an MT/NLP toolbox, offering a wide range of 'open' and powerful tools, which reflect the state-of-the-art in computing and linguistic techniques. These tools will then be validated via the production of a multilingual MT system based on second generation principles.With respect to the computing aspects, the main technical choices are: portability, maintainability, openness, possibility of evolution and ergonomy. This implies the use of standard techniques and tools (UNIX, X11, MOTIF, C, SQL, SGML).The linguistic developments, based on a syntactico-semantic analysis, will follow an industrial methodology, implying formal linguistic specifications. The use of specialised languages will ensure a better separation between software and lingware, and thus better modularity. The three-phase translation process guarantees the multilingual aspect of the MT system.