Word-level morphosyntactic descriptions, such as “Ncmsn ” designating a common masculine singular noun in the nominative, have been developed for all Slavic languages, yet there have been few attempts to arrive at a proposal that would be harmonised across the languages. Standardisation adds to the interchange potential of the resources, making it easier to develop multilingual applications or to evaluate language technology tools across several languages. The process of the harmonisation of morphosyntactic categories, esp. for morphologically rich Slavic languages is also interesting from a language-typological perspective. The EU MULTEXT-East project developed corpora, lexica and tools for seven languages, with the focus being on morphosyntactic data, including formal, EAGLES-based specifications for lexical morphosyntactic descriptions. The specifications were later extended, so that they currently cover nine languages, five from the Slavic family: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Serbian and Slovene. The paper presents these morphosyntactic specifications, giving their background and structure, including the encoding of the tables as TEI feature structures. The five Slavic language specifications are discussed in more depth. 1

The paper presents the SVEZ-IJS corpus, a large parallel annotated English-Slovene corpus containing translated legal texts of the European Union, the ACQUIS Communautaire. The corpus contains approx. 2 x 5 million words and was compiled from the translation memory obtained from the Translation Unit of the Slovene Government Office for European Affairs. The corpus is encoded in XML, according to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines TEI P4, where each translation memory unit contains useful metadata and the two aligned segments (sentences). Both the Slovene and English text is linguistically annotated at the word-level, by context disambiguated lemmas and morphosyntactic descriptions, which follow the MULTEXT guidelines. The complete corpus is freely available for research, either via an on-line concordancer, or for downloading from the corpus home page at

Part-of-speech tagging or, more accurately, morphosyntactic tagging, is a procedure that assigns to each word token appearing in a text its morphosyntactic description, e.g. “masculine singular common noun in the genitive case”. Morphosyntactic tagging is an important component of many language technology applications, such as machine translation, speech synthesis, or information extraction. In the paper we report on an experiment on morphosyntactic tagging of Slovene, on a sample of Slovene legal language. We evaluate the accuracy of the TnT tagger, which had been trained on the MULTEXT-East language resources for Slovene. The test data come from the freely available parallel English-Slovene corpus SVEZ-IJS, which contains the Slovene translation European Union legal acts. Presented are the details of the manually corrected test corpus and an analysis of the tagging errors. The paper also discusses a simple transformation-based program that fixes some of the more common errors, and concludes with some directions for future work. Povzetek: V prispevku je opisan poskus oblikoslovnega označevanja na vzorcu slovenskih pravnih besedil.

Freely available tools and language resources were used to build the VoiceTRAN statistical machine translation (SMT) system. Various configuration variations of the system are presented and evaluated. The VoiceTRAN SMT system outperformed the baseline conventional rule-based MT system in both English-Slovenian in-domain test setups. To further increase the generalization capability of the translation model for lower-coverage out-of-domain test sentences, an “MSD-recombination ” approach was proposed. This approach not only allows a better exploitation of conventional translation models, but also performs well in the more demanding translation direction; that is, into a highly inflectional language. Using this approach in the out-of-domain setup of the English-Slovenian JRC-ACQUIS task, we have achieved significant improvements in translation quality.

This paper describes the design phases of the VoiceTRAN Communicator, which integrates speech recognition, machine translation, and text-to-speech synthesis using the Galaxy architecture. The aim of the work was to build a robust multimodal speech-to-speech translation system able to translate simple domain-specific sentences in the language pair Slovenian-English. The work represents a joint collaboration between several Slovenian research organizations that are active in human language technologies. Govorni komunikator VoiceTRAN Prispevek opisuje delo na razvoju govornega komunikatorja VoiceTRAN, ki združuje tehnologije prepoznavanja govora, strojnega prevajanja in sinteze govora. Podajamo opis arhitekture sistema ter posameznih sistemskih modulov. Nadalje opisujemo jezikovne