Creating a Parallel Corpus from the \ Book of 2000 Tongues "

1 Abstract This paper reports on a project to annotate biblical texts in order to create an aligned multilingual Bible corpus for linguistic research, particularly computational linguistics, including automatically creating and evaluating translation lexicons and semantically tagged texts. The output of this project will enable researchers to take advantage of parallel translations across a wider number of languages than previously available, providing, with relatively little eeort, a corpus that contains careful translations and reliable alignment at the near-sentence level. We discuss the nature of the text, our annotation process, and intended uses for the corpus, and we point out relevant aspects and potential limitations of the current draft of the Corpus Encoding Standard with respect to this corpus. 2 Why this text? 2.1 The nature of the text The Bible is a widely available, representative sample of carefully translated texts in a variety of styles in a wide range of languages. These properties uniquely suit our research purposes, which include construction of translation lexicons, and evaluation of semantic tagging for multilingual machine translation and other natural language processing applications. The text is a single cohesive document comprising 66 books by 30-40 authors in a variety of text styles. The corpus provides a representative sample of language styles in the source texts, including narrative, poetry, and correspondence. The New Testament corpus alone \compares favourably in size to other major collections analysed by scholars ... approximately as large as if not larger than the corpus of Homer's Iliad, of Homer's Odyssey, of Sophocles, of Aeschylus, of Herodotus ... with] individual books ... comparable in size to other well-known classical texts: e.g. Plato's Apology approximates the size of Paul's Romans or 1 Corinthians" (Porter, 1989). As a resource for research using corpus-based statistical methods in computational linguistics, the Bible is small by current standards (e.g. see (Church and Mercer, 1993)); with some variation 1