CONTENT AND PROPERTIES OF "SET_B" DATA (the Bellcore archive, part 1)
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This data set was received by the LDC in a "run-off" format,
originally intended as input to a common typesetting process
(i.e. something like "nroff" or "troff").  Each individual file stores
material in one language from one day of parliamentary proceedings.
The file name reflects the date and language of the content (with date
rendered as "YYMMDD", e.g. 880901_f for the French version of
proceedings on September 1, 1988).

The text files are partitioned into sub-directories according to the
two-digit year ("86", "87", "88").  There are two additional
directories, which provide mappings for parallel content in the text
data: "tokn_map" and "para_map".  These will be explained below.

The conversion to SGML format retained information about paragraph
boundaries and about the source language of various portions of text.
In addition, each paragraph within a file was assigned a sequential
index.  The resulting SGML form is different from that of the "set_a"
data in two regards:

1. there are some lines in each file that contain only an SGML tag,
   and no text data; these lines are all of the form:

	<SRCLANG> English </SRCLANG>
   or:
	<SRCLANG> French </SRCLANG>

   These tags indicate the reported source language of the subsequent
   material.

2. the lines containing text all begin with the pattern:

	<p id=#>

   where "#" represents the one- to three-digit sequence number
   assigned to the paragraph; the first paragraph of every file is
   identified by sequence number "1" -- that is, the paragraph index
   values are NOT unique across files.  Also, the paragraph id numbers
   are not strictly sequential: there are occasional gaps in the
   numbering of the paragraphs.

With regard to the "<SRCLANG>" information, this is presented in
identical form in both the English and French files; if a given
passage of parallel text is preceded by "<SRCLANG> English </SRCLANG>"
in the English version, it will also be preceded by that same tag in
the French version, and the French version is therefore understood to
be a translation from the English.

After converting the original typesetting format to SGML form, it was
discovered that the extent of parallelism in file content, while
generally quite good, was disrupted by minor discrepancies in
paragraph divisions and inclusion versus exclusion of short
(single-sentence) paragraphs.  As a result, corresponding files were
found to contain different numbers of paragraphs; also, among the
indexed paragraphs in a given English file, there was a small subset
for which the corresponding French file did not contain a matching
paragraph, and vice-versa.

Given this situation, some additional processing of the "set_b" data
was performed by Dan Melamed at the University of Pennsylvania, in
order to establish a finer-grained parallelism among the file
contents.  His application of a "token mapping" algorithm yielded two
forms of parallel indexing: paragraph alignment and token correspondence.


-- Paragraph alignment of the "set_b" data 

The "para_map" directory contains one file for each English/French
text file pair (e.g. "para_map/880901_p.map" for "88/880901_e" and
"88/880901_f").  Each file contains two columns separated by a tab
character; the first column contains one or more paragraph index
numbers from the English file, and the second contains one or more
index numbers from the French file; if there are two or more paragraph
numbers within a single column of the listing, these are separated by
commas (e.g. "81 81,82").

The two columns on a given line represent paragraphs with presumed
parallel content.  In some cases, two or more paragraph indexes are
given in one column to indicate that two or more paragraphs in one
language were rendered as a single paragraph in the other.  It is also
possible that a sequence of one or more paragraphs in one or both
files may be skipped in the indexing.

The paragraph alignments were actually produced as a derivation from
the token alignment process described below.


-- Token alignment of the "set_b" data

The general strategy and approach of token mapping is described in
greater detail in papers presented by Dan Melamed (cf. the PostScript
files included in the "doc" directory of the CD-ROM).

The "tokn_map" directory contains one file for each English/French
text file pair (e.g. "tokn_map/880901_t.map" for "88/880901_e" and
"88/880901_f").  Each file contains two columns per line, separated by
a tab character.  Each column consists of a string containing a
paragraph-id and the byte counter to a character position within that
paragraph; these two values within the column are separated by a
colon.  The first column refers to the English file, and the second to
the French.  For example, the following line from a token map file:

	35:299.0	34:362.5

refers to an English word that is centered at 299 bytes into the line
that begins with the tag "<p id=35>", and to a French word that is
centered between bytes 362 and 363 in the line that begins with the
tag "<p id=34>"; these two words are purported to establish a
correspondence in the translation.  The byte offset into the paragraph
is based on the first character of the line (the open-angle bracket
"<") being at position 1.

The token alignments may identify punctuation marks in the text, as
well as word tokens; that is, the character to be found at a given
offset may be a comma, period, colon or other non-alphanumeric.  In
this case, the "tokens" that make up the alignment pairing are the
punction marks themselves, not the words that they are adjacent to.

(If the character found at an alignment offset is alphanumeric, it
should be the case that the given character position represents the
center of a word token that establishes an alignment pairing.)

Obviously, this mapping does not cover all tokens in either language,
but it does serve to establish a large quantity of reference points
for lexical correspondences.

In order to make it easier to use the mapping information, all the map
files and text data for set_b have been published without compression.

It should be pointed out that Melamed had set parameters in his
token-mapping algorithm to trade off some amount of accuracy for
greater execution speed when treating this data set.  A more careful
application of the method (especially with a cleaner version of the
source texts) would likely yield a better set of correspondences.


-- Final corrections to text content

The token mapping and paragraph alignment processes revealed some
apparent corruptions in a subset of the text files; the origin of the
corruption is not known (it appeared in the materials received by the
LDC), but the symptom appeared as a "mis-filing" of (portions of) some
proceedings.  The "mis-filing" showed signs of being due to some
software malfunction, whereby a final portion of one text, starting at
some arbitrary position, was appended to the end of some other text;
sometimes this would result in the same text content appearing in two
files, and sometimes the appended material was from the other
language.  Often, the appended material began in mid-sentence.
Surprisingly, there were many cases where both the English and French
files for a given session were found to contain appended material that
was likewise parallel in content, though the starting points of the
appended material were not well aligned.

We have tried to locate these corruptions in the SGML text files, and
to eliminate material that was fragmented, duplicated elsewhere, or
clearly unrelated to material in the corresponding file in the other
language.  Presumably, some instances of these problems may remain.

Because the token correspondences were computed before a number of
corruptions in the text files were discovered and corrected, it is
possible that some mapping files will contain ranges of false
correspondences.  We have tried to identify and fix or remove faulty
mappings, but some residual errors are likely to have escaped notice.