Corpora with Part-of-Speech Annotations for Three Regional Languages of France: Alsatian, Occitan and Picard

Corpora with Part-of-Speech Annotations for Three Regional Languages of France: Alsatian, Occitan and Picard Delphine Bernhard1, Anne-Laure Ligozat2, Fanny Martin3, Myriam Bras4, Pierre Magistry5, Marianne Vergez-Couret6, Lucie Steibl´e1, Pascale Erhart1, Nabil Hathout4, Dominique Huck1, Christophe Rey7, Philippe Reyn´es3, Sophie Rosset5, Jean Sibille4, Thomas Lavergne8 1LiLPa, Universit´e de Strasbourg, France 2LIMSI, CNRS, ENSIIE, Universit´e Paris-Saclay, F-91405 Orsay, France 3Laboratoire Habiter le Monde - HM - EA 4278, Universit´e de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France 4CLLE, Universit´e de Toulouse, CNRS, UT2J, France 5LIMSI, CNRS, Universit´e Paris-Saclay, F-91405 Orsay, France 6Queen’s University, Belfast 7LT2D (Lexiques, Textes, Discours, Dictionnaires), Universit´e de Cergy-Pontoise, IUF 8LIMSI, CNRS, Univ. Paris-Sud, Universit´e Paris-Saclay, F-91405 Orsay, France 1{dbernhard,lucie.steible,pascale.erhart,huck}@unistra.fr 2,5,8{annlor,magistry,sophie.rosset,thomas.lavergne}@limsi.fr 3{fanny.martin,philippe.reynes}@u-picardie.fr 4{myriam.bras,nabil.hathout,jean.sibille}@univ-tlse2.fr 6m.vergez-couret@qub.ac.uk 7christophe.rey@u-cergy.fr Abstract This article describes the creation of corpora with part-of-speech annotations for three regional languages of France: Alsatian, Occitan and Picard. These manual annotations were performed in the context of the RESTAURE project, whose goal is to develop resources and tools for these under-resourced French regional languages. The article presents the tagsets used in the annotation process as well as the resulting annotated corpora. Keywords: corpus, annotation, part-of-speech, Alsatian, Occitan, Picard 1. Introduction Since the constitutional amendment (Article 75-1) pub- lished in 2008, regional languages are officially part of the heritage of France, although the only official language in France is French (Article 2). As such, it is essential to im- plement modern means for their preservation and transmis- sion, relying particularly on digital technologies. Regional languages of France can be considered as low-resourced, that is to say there are no or only few electronic resources (corpora, lexicons, dictionaries) and tools. All languages with little resources have in common that their computeri- sation has a low financial profitability which does not com- pensate for considerable development costs. However, en- dowing these languages with electronic resources and tools is a major concern for their dissemination, protection and teaching (including for new speakers). Automatic tools help ensure data collection (scanning), storage in standard- ized formats, categorization and retrieval. Moreover, the availability of digital data and automatic processing tools can transform the attitude of speakers towards regional lan- guages, in particular increase the use of written material that often remains marginal. In a broader perspective, it is the diversity of world languages which would be better pre- served and the amount of data available to researchers in human and social sciences (linguistics, sociology, anthro- pology, literature, history, ...) would increase (Soria et al., 2013). The overall objective of the RESTAURE1 project is to pro- vide computational resources and processing tools for three regional languages of France: Alsatian, Occitan and Picard. The three of them belong to the languages of France listed in Cerquiglini’s 1999 report (Cerquiglini, 1999), which in- ventories the regional languages of France within the mean- ing of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Lan- guages. They have no official status in France and as such, have suffered from a lack of institutional support until re- cently. The goal of this project is to bring these …

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