Dear colleagues,
I realized (sigh!) that my previous mail on aligners could also be
interpreted as a specific criticism of ParaConc.
I had not that in mind, since I don't even know the last version of it.
So let me try to counterbalance the (possible) harm done by pointing out two
things:
- the approach I suggested for alignment, with EasyAlign, could actually
also be used to produce aligned texts for ParaConc
- Michael Barlow has told me that parallel corpora providers can use
ParaConc embedded in their CDs, and this is obviously a good (probably even
better) alternative to having the resources on the Web. IMS-CWB samplers
also exist that are run from a CD, but here again we have the irreducible OS
difference, the former running in Windows and the latter in Unix.
It is actually possible that the two systems (IMS-CWB and ParaConc) actually
share a number of interesting features in dealing with parallel corpora,
like the support for different languages and character sets and the display
of several translations/languages in parallel (not only two). For what I
know, they may be not so different in capabilities dealing with parallel
corpora after all (except that IMS-CWB does have an aligner and not
ParaConc, and this is why all this mail exchange started). I have no way of
looking into this now, but maybe Sampo will, after all...
And now some Gricean comments:
Should one answer just the question that was posed, or try to help the
person who is asking it, BEYOND what was actually asked?
And list-Gricean: should one answer to the person who asked the question to
the list, or should one answer also the potential readers with a "parallel"
question?
To be honest, I had someone telling me that alignment was a
difficult/unsolved problem the other day, with the justification of the
"recent discussion on the corpora list". That was why I became aware of the
(potential) problem of posting answers to a particular question. And decided
to post to the list.
And, by the way, I know many other aligners... Not everyone who is working
on aligment is interested in sharing their programs with other people,
though. [And nobody should feel forced to do it, either!] So, I think it is
quite good that there are commercial programs out there, where by definition
people is interested in "sharing" the programs with us. I see absolutely
nothing wrong in discussing commercial systems in this list. What I reacted
to was the narrow subject: "aligners for a particular commercial system,
without reference to alignment in general and parallel corpora systems in
general".
And I definitely promise that even if the present message is thoroughly
misunderstood, I quit here and won't post more on these subjects to the
corpora list.
Diana
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