The Formosan Language Archive: Linguistic Analysis and Language Processing

In this paper, we deal with the linguistic analysis approach adopted in the Formosan Language Corpora, one of the three main information databases included in the Formosan Language Archive, and the language processing programs that have been built upon it. We first discuss problems related to the transcription of different language corpora. We then deal with annotation rules and standards. We go on to explain the linguistic identification of clauses, sentences and paragraphs, and the computer programs used to obtain an alignment of words, glosses and sentences in Chinese and English. We finally show how we try to cope with analytic inconsistencies through programming. This paper is a complement to Zeitoun et al. [2003] in which we provided an overview of the whole architecture of the Formosan Language Archive.