Parallel corpora, parallel worlds: Selected papers from a symposium on parallel and comparable corpora at Uppsala University, Sweden, 22-23 April, 1999

In his substantial introduction to a dozen edited papers from an April 1999 symposium at the U. of Uppsala stemming from a research program on translation begun in 1996, Borin overviews the themes of parallel corpus linguistics that has emerged in the past decade as an offshoot of corpus linguistics; terminology defining parallel corpus, typically connoting original texts in one language and their translations into another; and the distinction between the older tradition extending textual studies, and new interest in probabilistic methods for pursuing the knowledge-acquisition problem in Natural Language Processing, aka, computational linguistics. Contributors discuss Scandinavian projects mainly, multilingual information retrieval, minority language revival, and automated tools for generating bilingual concordances (e.g. the PLUG Link Annotator). There is no index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)