Review on the Existing Language Resources for Languages of France

Review on the Existing Language Resources for Languages of France Thibault Grouas1, Valérie Mapelli2, Quentin Samier2 1 Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France 6 rue des Pyramides, 75001 Paris, France Email: thibault.grouas@culture.gouv.fr 2 ELDA/ELRA 9 rue des Cordelières, 75013 Paris, France Email: mapelli@elda.org; quentin@elda.org Abstract With the support of the DGLFLF, ELDA conducted an inventory of existing language resources for the regional languages of France. The main aim of this inventory was to assess the exploitability of the identified resources within technologies. A total of 2,299 Language Resources were identified. As a second step, a deeper analysis of a set of three language groups (Breton, Occitan, overseas languages) was carried out along with a focus of their exploitability within three technologies: automatic translation, voice recognition/synthesis and spell checkers. The survey was followed by the organisation of the TLRF2015 Conference which aimed to present the state of the art in the field of the Technologies for Regional Languages of France. The next step will be to activate the network of specialists built up during the TLRF conference and to begin the organisation of a second TLRF conference. Meanwhile, the French Ministry of Culture continues its actions related to linguistic diversity and technology, in particular through a project with Wikimedia France related to contributions to Wikipedia in regional languages, the upcoming new version of the “Corpus de la Parole” and the reinforcement of the DGLFLF’s Observatory of Linguistic Practices. Keywords: regional languages of France, inventory, language resources. 1. Context and Aim of the Project As a result of a partnership with the Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France (DGLFLF, French Ministry of Culture and Communication) 1 , the Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) 2 conducted an inventory of language resources currently existing for the regional languages of France throughout mainland France and French overseas departments and territories (Leixa et al., 2014). The primary goal of the inventory was to assess the exploitability of these identified resources within different kinds of language technologies. With adapted technologies, regional languages are expected to gain more visibility and applicability among a wider audience. For that purpose, the task was to identify the main channels of production and dissemination and to provide a non- exhaustive list of the existing language resources. The following section will explain in more detail how the task was carried out and how the scope of our study was defined by laying down a number of criteria. The next section will fully describe the outcomes of the whole project. The third and final section will provide the implications, recommendations and future prospects of the study. 2. Up-front Work and Methodology The scope of the identification task had to be defined in order to ensure the accomplishment of the assigned objectives mentioned in the section above. First of all, we agreed on the types of language technologies most adapted to our goal, based upon the list provided by the MetaNet White Paper …

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