MLIF: A Metamodel to Represent and Exchange Multilingual Textual Information ISO TC37 SC4 WG Samuel Cruz-Lara, Gil Francopoulo, Laurent Romary, Nasredine Semmar LREC 2010, 19 May 2010

Outline Scope of MLIF Purpose and Justification of MLIF Description of MLIF Use Cases Current Status 2

Scope of MLIF

4 Scope MLIF aims at proposing a specification platform to represent multilingual data within a large variety of applications such as translation memories, localization, computer-aided translation, multimedia or electronic document management MLIF introduces a metamodel in combination with chosen data categories in order to allow the description of any specific domain MLIF provides a way to validate any instance of this metamodel, as well as, interoperability principles with numerous translation and localization standards

Outline Scope of MLIF Purpose and Justification of MLIF Description of MLIF Use Cases Current Status 5

6 Purpose and Justification The evolution of Communication and Information Technologies and in particular natural language processing, makes acute the question of standardization The issues related to standardization are of an industrial, economic and cultural nature The control of the interoperability between the existing industrial standards for localization (XLIFF), translation memory (TMX), … constitutes a major objective for a coherent and global management of multilingual data MLIF could be associated to multimedia standards such as MPEG-4 [ISO/IEC ], MPEG-7 [ ISO/IEC ], and W3C SMIL, in order to handle multilingual data within several multimedia applications such as, interactive TV, video conferencing, subtitling, etc All these formats work well in the specific field they are designed for, but they lack a synergy that would make them interoperable when using one type of information in a slightly different context MLIF should be considered as a unified conceptual representation of multilingual and multimedia content

Outline Scope of MLIF Purpose and Justification of MLIF Description of MLIF Use Cases Current Status 7

8 Description of MLIF As with “Terminological Markup Framework” TMF [ISO 16642] in terminology, MLIF introduces a metamodel in combination with chosen data categories [ ISO ] These data categories will be derived as a subset of a Data Category Registry (DCR) in order to ensure interoperability between several multilingual applications and corpora A Data Category Specification (DCS) will define, in combination with the metamodel, the various constraints that apply to a given domain-specific information structure or interchange format MLIF describes elementary linguistic segments (i.e. sentence, syntactical component, word, …)

MLDC (Multi Lingual Data Collection) GI (Global Information) HistoC (History Component) GroupC (Grouping Component) MultiC (Multilingual Component) MonoC (MonoLingual Component) SegC (Segmentation Component) 9 MLIF Metamodel

10 MLIF Metamodel Multi Lingual Data Collection (MLDC) Represents a collection of data containing global information and several multilingual units Global Information (GI) Represents technical and administrative information applying to the entire data collection. Example: title of the data collection, revision history, …

11 MLIF Metamodel History Component (HistoC) This generic component allows to trace modifications on the component it is anchored to (i.e. versioning) Grouping Component (GroupC) Represents a sub-collection of multilingual data having a common origin or purpose within a given project

MLIF Metamodel Multi Lingual Component (MultiC) This component represents a unique multilingual entry Mono Lingual Component (MonoC) Part of a multilingual component containing information related to one language Segmentation Component (SegC) A recursive component allowing any level of segmentation for textual information In order to provide a larger description of the linguistic content, the MLIF metamodel allows anchoring of other metamodels, such as MAF (morphological description), SynAF (syntactical annotation), TMF (terminological description), or any other metamodel based on ISO

Data Categories Domain Project Source sourceType sourceLanguage class duration begin next xml:id xml:lang xlink … 13 MLIF Metamodel

MLIF: a simple example 14

Outline Scope of MLIF Purpose and Justification of MLIF Description of MLIF Use Cases Current Status 15

16 Use Cases Interoperability Linguistic Properties Related Standards Multimedia Interactive TV

17 Interoperability TMX “ the sentence contains different formatting information ”

Interoperability 18 TMX file MLIF file

Linguistic Properties Sentences, words, … Time related issues 19

Linguistic Properties 20 TMX file produced by TRADOS MLIF file produced by CEA LIST Sentence Aligner

21 Related Standards TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) The description of all different XML elements has been done by using RelaxNG [ ISO ] with the help of ODD W3C ITS (International Tag Set) ITS is a set of rules, expressed in elements, that provide information on how parts of a given DTD or XML Schema are related to specific internationalization & localization propertie W3C SMIL SMILtext MLIF may be used to include pre-existant non-MLIF data like the ones that are produced by NLP tools

Multimedia 22

Interactive TV Timed, Multilingual Textual Descriptions W3C SMIL Standardization - Development of Interactive TV Profile - Integration of Annotation Support - Definition of Temporal Text Processing ISO MLIF Standardization - Development of MLIF format - Development of a multilingual processing pipeline - Interaction with SMIL and MPEG standards multilingual component multilingual DB linguistic segment l’histoire du courage d’une femme pour démasquer un mystère Monolingual component linguistic segment la historia da la valentía de una mujer para desenmascarar un misterio Monolingual component 23

Outline Scope of MLIF Purpose and Justification of MLIF Description of MLIF Use Cases Current Status 24

Current Status AWI (August 2006) CD (Mai 2009) DIS (February 2010) Ongoing ballot process 25

26 Thank you! Thank you for your attention Any question? Mailing list Web site