Developping Tools and Building Linguistic Resources for Vietnamese Morpho-syntactic Processing

Vietnamese is spoken by about 80 millions people around the world, yet very few concrete works on this language have been noticed in Natural Language Processing (NLP) until now. The fundamental problems in automatic analysis of Vietnamese, such as part-ofspeech (POS) tagging, parsing, etc. are extremely difficult due to the lack of formal linguistic knowledge on one hand, and the specificities of isolating languages on the other hand. In this paper we present our efforts to develop a set of tools permitting the construction and management of language resources for Vietnamese in a normalized framework, whose aim is to be largely distributed and usable for research purposes in NLP. We first define a tagset by constructing Vietnamese morpho-syntactic descriptors that fit in a model compatible with MULTEXT, so as to account for possible multilingual applications as well as the reusability of defined tagsets. We then implement a system undertaking the tasks of word segmentation and POS tagging. Our system ensures a representation format of linguistic resources that is currently considered in the framework of ISO TC37 SC4. Finally we attempt to construct a formal syntactic description of nominal groups using the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) formalism.