Tatoeba
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Type of site | Open collaborative multilingual sentence dictionary |
|---|---|
| Available in | 15 languages; content in 87 languages |
| Owner | Trang Ho |
| Created by | Trang Ho |
| URL | http://tatoeba.org/ |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
Tatoeba.org is a free online database of example sentences geared towards foreign language learners. Its name comes from the Japanese term "tatoeba" (例えば tatoeba), meaning "for example". Unlike other online dictionaries, which focus on words, Tatoeba focuses on complete sentences, their grammatical properties, and translating them into other languages. Anyone can sign up and contribute, regardless of linguistics background or second language proficiency. Tatoeba was founded and is maintained by its sole administrator, Trang Ho, and is hosted and supported by the Free Software Foundation France[1].
Content
As of March 2011, Tatoeba's corpus has 780,000 sentences in 87 languages. A list of how many sentences there are in each language can be found here. The interface is available in 15 different languages.
Tatoeba is also the current home of the Tanaka Corpus, a once public-domain series of about 150,000 English-Japanese sentence pairs compiled by Hyogo University professor Yasuhito Tanaka first released in 2001, and where it is undergoing its latest revisions [2][3].
Site capabilities
Users, even non-registered ones, can search for words in any language to retrieve a list of sentences using that word. Each sentence in the Tatoeba database are displayed next to its translations in other languages; direct and indirect translations are differentiated. Sentences are tagged for content such as subject matter, dialect, or vulgarity; they also each have individual comment threads to facilitate feedback and corrections from other users and cultural notes. Almost 10,000 sentences in 8 languages currently have audio readings. Sentences can also be browsed by language, tag, or audio.
Registered users can add new sentences or translate or proofread existing ones, even if their target language is not their native tongue. Translations are linked to the original sentence automatically. Users can freely edit their own sentences, "adopt" and correct sentences without an owner, and comment on others' sentences. Trusted users, a rank above new users, can tag, untag, link, and unlink sentences.
Database structure
Tatoeba's basic data structure is a series of nodes and links. Each sentence is a node; each link bridges two or more sentences with the same meaning[4].
License
The entire Tatoeba database is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license[5], freeing it for academic and other use.
Acclaim
Tatoeba received a grant from Mozilla Drumbeat in December 2010[6][7].
Usage
Parallel text corpora such as Tatoeba are useful for a variety of natural language processing tasks such as machine translation. The Tatoeba data is both usable (due to being well aligned) and accessible (due to the free license) and has been used as data for treebanking Japanese [8] and statistical machine translation [9], as well as its use in the WWWJDIC English-Japanese dictionary.
References
- ^ "Tatoeba, un dictionnaire de langues pour phrases d'exemples". fsffrance.org (in French). Paris: FSF France. February 24, 2011. Retrieved March 20, 2011.
{{cite web}}: Unknown parameter|trans_title=ignored (|trans-title=suggested) (help) - ^ "Tanaka Corpus". EDRDG Wiki. Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group. February 3, 2011. Retrieved March 20, 2011.
- ^ Breen, Jim (March 2, 2011). "WWWJDIC - Information". WWWJDIC. Monash University. Retrieved March 20, 2011.
- ^ Ho, Trang (February 23, 2010). "How to be a good contributor in Tatoeba". Tatoeba Project Blog. Retrieved March 20, 2011.
- ^ "Terms of use". Tatoeba.org. Retrieved March 20, 2011.
- ^ Ho, Trang (January 17, 2011). "Grant from Mozilla Drumbeat". Tatoeba Project Blog. Retrieved March 20, 2011.
- ^ Moltke, Henrik (December 30, 2010). "Best Drumbeat Projects: Tatoeba – a free and open database of sentences". Yoyodyne.cc. Retrieved March 20, 2011.
...the Mozilla Foundation wants to encourage and help the Tatoeba project by giving it a USD 2.5K Mozilla Drumbeat Grant.
- ^ Francis Bond, 栗林 孝行 [Takayuki Kuribayashi], 橋本 力 [Hashimoto Chikara] (2008) HPSGに基づくフリーな日本語ツリー バンクの構築 [A free Japanese Treebank based on HPSG]. In 14th Annual Meeting of The Association for Natural Language Processing, Tokyo.
- ^ Eric Nichols, Francis Bond, Darren Scott Appling and Yuji Matsumoto (2010) Paraphrasing Training Data for Statistical Machine Translation. Journal of Natural Language Processing, 17(3), pages 101-122.
External links
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