Building and Annotating the Linguistically Diverse NTU-MC (NTU-Multilingual Corpus)

The NTU-MC compilation taps on the linguistic diversity of multilingual texts available within Singapore. The current version of NTU-MC contains 595,000 words (26,000 sentences) in 7 languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) from 7 language families (Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Indo-European, Austronesian, Japonic, Korean as a language isolate and Austro-Asiatic). The NTU-MC is annotated with a layer of monolingual annotation (POS and sense tags) and cross-lingual annotation (sentence-level alignments). The diverse language data and cross-lingual annotations provide valuable information on linguistic diversity for traditional linguistic research as well as natural language processing tasks. This paper describes the corpus compilation process with the evaluation of the monolingual and cross-lingual annotations of the corpus data. The corpus is available under the Creative Commons – Attribute 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).