# TEI Header

type: | corpus
date: | 2006-05-14 (created)

## File Description

Title Statement:
  Title:
    Multilingual Parallel Corpus "JRC-Acquis"
  Title:
    English language part
  Responsibility Statement:
      Bruno Pouliquen (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
      Camelia Ignat (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
      Anna Widiger (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
      Tomaž Erjavec (Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
      Ralf Steinberger (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
    Compilation of the corpus.
  Principal researcher:
      Ralf Steinberger
    Address:
      European Commission
      Joint Research Centre - IPSC
      Ralf Steinberger
      T.P. 267
      Via E. Fermi 1
      21020 Ispra (VA)
      Italy
      Fax: (+39) 0332 78 5154
      EMail: Ralf.Steinberger@jrc.it
      URL: http://www.jrc.it/langtech/
Edition Statement:
  Edition:
    Version 2.2
Extent:
  21 languages, 185 million words
Publication Statement:
  Place of publication:
    http://www.jrc.it/langtech/
  Availiability (restricted) :

    According to an agreement with the European Commission's Publications Office OPOCE, the AC corpus can be used and distributed for research purposes, but the following usage conditions must be adhered to:

    > The European Communities consider legislative and quasi-legislative documents published in the Official Journal of the European Union and related COM and SEC series as well as charters and treaties and ECJ case-law to be in the public domain. Prior written permission is thus not required for their reproduction/translation, and they may be reproduced/translated freely without restriction, including for the purpose of further non-commercial dissemination to final users, subject to the condition that appropriate acknowledgment is given to the European Communities and to the source, and provided that the additional guidelines set out below are respected.

    > (1) Whenever a document is reproduced verbatim from a source other than the printed version of the Official Journal of the European Union, a prominently positioned disclaimer should read:

    > 'Only European Community legislation printed in the paper edition of the Official Journal of the European Union is deemed authentic.'

    > (2) For the reasons stated in the disclaimer above, it is advisable to ensure that translations are made from the printed, authentic version of the Official Journal. This precaution, while minimizing the risk of error, does not confer any legal status whatsoever to the translated text. The following notice shall accompany the translated text, printed below the acknowledgment:

    > 'Originally published in the official languages of the European Union in the Official Journal of the European Union by the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. Responsibility for the translation into [specify language] from the original [specify language] edition lies entirely with [name of translation copyright holder].'

    > Moreover, please note that we do not consider a "further commercial dissemination" the inclusion, as reference material for consultation purposes, of small amounts of relevant legislative texts in articles/thesis/studies/reports/books issued by third-party authors or publishers, whatever the means, and disseminated subject to payment.

    When using the JRC-Acquis, please acknowledge this in your publications, making reference to the following paper:
    Ralf Steinberger , Bruno Pouliquen , Anna Widiger , Camelia Ignat , Tomaž Erjavec , Dan Tufiş , and Dániel Varga The JRC-Acquis: A multilingual aligned parallel corpus with 20+ languages In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC'06, Genoa, Italy, 2006.
    Please check http://www.jrc.it/langtech/index.html#Publications for more recent publications on the subject.

  Distributor:
    Address:
      Language Technology Group
      Joint Research Centre - IPSC
      European Commission
      T.P. 267
      Via E. Fermi 1
      21020 Ispra (VA)
      Italy
      Fax: (+39) 0332 78 5154
      URL: http://www.jrc.it/langtech
Notes Statement:
  Note:
    Only European Community legislation printed in the paper edition of the Official Journal of the European Union is deemed authentic.
Source Description:
  Title Statement:
    Title:
      The Acquis Communautaire
  Publication Statement:
    Place of publication:
      http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/
    Publisher:
      The European Commission's Publications Office OPOCE
    Date:
      2004-12

## Encoding Description

Sampling declaration:

  The CELEX Web site was queried for all CELEX descriptors, for all the languages; note that not all documents with a given CELEX number are available for all the languages. For a given Celex Code and a given language, the query URL has been for most documents: http://europa.eu.int/smartapi/cgi/sga_doc?smartapi%21celexplus%21prod%21CELEXnumdoc&numdoc=CELEXCODE&lg=LG where the two parameters CELEXCODE and LG are to be replaced by their respective values.

  The downloaded documents were then automatically checked for the language, because not all documents were actually in the expected language.

  In the final corpus were included only those documents that are available in ten or more 10 languages of which at least 3 are one of the new-EU languages or Romanian, i.e. Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Maltese, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene.

Editorial declaration:
  Correction:

    No correction was performed on the text.

  Normalisation:

    After HTML document download, the texts were converted to XML. A specific character encoding conversion tried to keep Greek characters; no other character conversions were performed. The title and body of each text were isolated, the paragraph breaks (<P> HTML tags) were kept.

  Segmentation:

    A list of manually written rules detected the beginning of the annexes and signatures of texts. These rules were used to distinguish between the text body, the signature of the text and the annexes. They were manually written by developers who do not speak the 20 languages. It is likely that some of the signatures and annexes were missed, and others may have been recognized wrongly.

  Hyphenation:

    Except for errors, no end-of-line hyphenation present in texts.

  Standard values:

    The two-letter language codes follow ISO 639 and are defined in the language usage element.

    All documents have a numerical identifier, the so-called CELEX code (see http://europa.eu.int/celex/). This code identifies the same text in the various languages.

  Further information on the corpus compilation steps can be found in:
  Ralf Steinberger , Bruno Pouliquen , Anna Widiger , Camelia Ignat , Tomaž Erjavec , Dan Tufiş , and Dániel Varga The JRC-Acquis: A multilingual aligned parallel corpus with 20+ languages In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC'06, Genoa, Italy, 2006. Available at http://www.jrc.it/langtech/index.html#Publications.

Class declaration:
  Taxonomy:
      Eurovoc thesaurus
    Note:
      Most CELEX (EU) documents have been manually classified according to the subject domains to which they belong. The classification scheme used is the Eurovoc thesaurus (see http://europa.eu.int/celex/eurovoc/), which is a multilingual wide-coverage conceptual thesaurus. The European Parliament, large parts of the European Commission and about twenty national and regional European parliaments use Eurovoc for the classification of their documents. The Eurovoc thesaurus consists of over 6,000 descriptor terms (classes) that are organised hierarchically into up to eight levels, using the relationships Broader Term - Narrower Term (BT-NT) to describe the hierarchical relationship, and Related Term (RT) to link descriptors that are related, but not linked hierarchically. Additionally, synonyms and near-synonyms for some of the descriptors are listed, marked with the Use-For (UF) tag. Eurovoc exists in over twenty languages and is maintained actively. As the descriptors are defined precisely with Scope Notes, each descriptor has exactly one translation in each of the languages. Numerical descriptor IDs link the various language versions. This feature makes Eurovoc an ideal means for cross-lingual search and retrieval applications, and more.
      While the parliaments use professional human indexers to classify their documents manually, the JRC has been working on automating this task. For details, see http://www.jrc.cec.eu.int/langtech/Eurovoc.html.
      Most Acquis Communautaire texts have been classified manually with Eurovoc descriptors. The file celex-EurovocId.txt contains the lists of numerical descriptor IDs that have been assigned to each of the AC documents. As the AC documents have been written over a period of about fifty years and the Eurovoc thesaurus keeps evolving, the documents are indexed with different Eurovoc versions. Moreover, the numerical Eurovoc descriptor IDs have changed from being 16-digit codes (containing implicitly the hierarchical ordering of the descriptor terms) to being a number with between one and four digits. A conversion file is necessary to link the 16-digit codes used by the JRC's Language Technology team with the equivalent Eurovoc descriptor terms.

## Profile Description

Language use:
  cs = Czech
  da = Danish
  de = German
  el = Greek
  en = English
  es = Spanish
  et = Estonian
  fi = Finnish
  fr = French
  hu = Hungarian
  it = Italian
  lt = Lithuanian
  lv = Latvian
  nl = Dutch
  mt = Maltese
  no = Norwegian
  pl = Polish
  pt = Portuguese
  ro = Romanian
  sk = Slovak
  sl = Slovene
  sv = Swedish

## Revision Description

- 2006-05-14 Tomaž Erjavec
  Conversion of Version 2.2 to TEI.