In this paper, the realisation of the French Liaison is investigated in a large corpus of casual speech. Considering that casual speech gives rise to a large range of pronunciation variants and that overall temporal reduction increases, one may hypothesize that French liaison tends to be less productive in this speaking style. We made use of automatic processing such as automatic speech alignments to evaluate when liaison is realized in the NCCFr corpus. Realized liaisons were examined and measured for the most frequent liaison consonants (/z/, /n/ and /t/) as a function of a liaison sites classified as mandatory, optional or forbidden. The relation between speech rate and liaison realization is also examined.

It is important to realise that human translation is difficult and diverse, and that automation is needed not only by end users, but also by translators and Interpreters. Also, automation itself comes in many forms. After briefly describing computer tools for translators, we will concentrate on the linguistic and computer approaches to the automation of translation proper. This survey will yield an array of criteria for categorizing existing CAT systems, with brief examples of the state of the art. Finally, we present perspectives of future research, development, and dissemination.

This study addresses prosodic evolution in the French news announcer style, based on acoustic analysis of French audiovisual archives. A 10-hour corpus covering six decades of broadcast news is investigated automatically, focusing on word-initial stress, which may give an impression of emphatic style. Objective measurements suggest that the following features have decreased since the forties: mean pitch, pitch rise associated with initial stress, and vowel duration characterising an emphatic initial stress. The onsets of stressed initial syllables have become longer while speech rate (measured at the phonemic level) has not changed. This puzzling outcome raises interesting questions for research on French prosody, suggesting that the durational correlates of word-initial stress have changed over time, in the French news announcer style.

This paper is part of the PROLEX project of automatic processing of proper nouns. Our objective consists, with the help of the computer, not only in identifying the various occurrences of the definite proper noun (modified or not modified), but also in tagging them with a relevant type of interpretation: referential, denominative, model, metaphoric or split. After the elaboration of a typology of the various uses of the definite proper noun, we try to extract the formal and lexical indications allowing for the deambiguation of the referential and semantic functioning of the proper noun. After isolating these differential units (e.g. determiners, adjectives, predicates of existence), we build local grammars intended for automatic recognition.

The aim of this article is to present a practical implementation of the notion of a "domain" for the automatic processing of domain information and its application to information retrieval on the web. After a discussion of the problems that arise when assigning a text to a given domain, we will define a domain as a set of hyperclasses (such as human, concrete, locative, actions etc.) and of object classes, which correspond to the structure of a simple sentence into predicates and arguments. This semantic-syntactic information is already encoded in general and technical language dictionaries. In these dictionaries we distinguish between simple and compound words. On the basis of the dictionaries we will tag web pages. A first application has enabled the search engine Alta Vista to identify 29 languages. We have also found that the identification of compound word allows queries that lead to more precise and more rapid results, compared to search algorithms that work exclusively with the simple words of the compound expression. Information retrieval can thus be considerably improved by taking into account compound words. An application of this research will be the retrieval of texts in medical language that we are carrying out in the framework of the European Commission research project Webling.

Two approaches to the development of medieval text corpora can be distinguished among the projects carried out since a few decades. The first one consists of digitizing modern critical editions, and the second one is concerned with the production of precise diplomatic transcriptions of manuscripts, often directly linked to the photographs of the originals. These approaches are in fact complementary rather than contradictory, as they make it possible for scholars to choose between the quantity (representativeness) and the quality (accuracy and richness) of the data depending on the goals of their research. For both types of corpora, the challenges of their XML-TEI encoding related to the tools of their processing and analyzing are considered. Many methodological problems which arise from creating and processing medieval text corpora also concern other types of linguistic corpora.

The Department of Applied Language Studies of Lessius and the Research unit of quantitative and variational linguistics of the K.U. Leuven have been invited by the translation department of the Ministry of Justice to develop a Terminology Management System (TMS) of legal phraseology and terminology allowing translators to work with correct, coherent and expert-revised phraseologies and terminologies in the three national languages. This paper firstly investigates how terminology management has been carried out in the translation departments of the federal public services of justice in Belgium. Based on this survey, this paper proposes a TMS tool which is based on a new concept of phraseological terminology. To reach this goal, an extraction method of phraseological terminology based on some usage-based models of language will serve as a basis of a customised experimental analysis method which will allow us to design a road map capable of developing terminology, specifically engineered for the legal translation LSP.

We present here an automated identification of proper name antonomasia in tagged texts. First, we compare manual and computed identification, describing the system's cogs as well as the methods and tools we used ; we point out that the automated process is better concerning reliability.After having exposed how capabilities and limits of automated location can influence linguistic work, we compare this rather old (2000) work with new tools now usable by linguists, e.g. the query ability on a subset of tagged texts in the Frantext database.

Reference to a well-known proverb or phrase by altering one of its components is a widespread phenomenon in the British and American press. Since such modifications can impede a non-native speaker's understanding of newspaper or magazine articles, a system that could identify them and refer learners of English as a second language to the original wording of such expressions might be useful in the conception of an on-line comprehension assistant. Using a data base of 10 500 titles from an American news magazine, we analyze the various types of modifications that come into play in the use of shared cultural references. Through the comparison of our data base with 800 English proverbs, we test various ways in which such modifications can be automatically detected.

This paper is related with a collective linguistic research project about the word and its gloss. Just like definitions, glosses catch 'the spoken experience of the meaning'. In French texts, this metalinguistic activity appears in words such as c'est-à-dire, ou, signifier. These signs can clarify the nature of the semantical relationship between two words: specification with au sens, equivalency with ou, c'est-à-dire, nomination with dit, baptisé, hyponymy with en particulier, comme, hyperonymy with et/ou autre(s), etc. Glosses can be automatically located because of both their marks and the features of their configurations. This paper describes an automatical retriever implementation, using 'ou glosses' as 'un magazine électronique, ou webzine' and a data-processing environment 'for linguists', namely the textual base Frantext and its Stella query language interpreter.