Formalising natural languages with NooJ

NooJ is a linguistic development environment that provides tools for linguists to construct linguistic resources that formalise a large gamut of linguistic phenomena: typography, orthography, lexicons for simple words, multiword units and discontinuous expressions, inflectional and derivational morphology, local, structural and transformational syntax, and semantics. For each resource that linguists create, NooJ provides parsers that can apply it to any corpus of texts in order to extract examples or counter-examples, to annotate matching sequences, to perform statistical analyses, etc. NooJ also contains generators that can produce the texts that these linguistic resources describe, as well as a rich toolbox that allows linguists to construct, maintain, test, debug, accumulate and reuse linguistic resources. For each elementary linguistic phenomenon to be described, NooJ proposes a set of computational formalisms, the power of which ranges from very efficient finite-state automata to very powerful Turing machines. This makes NooJ’s approach different from most other computational linguistic tools that typically offer a unique formalism to their users. Since it was released in 2002, NooJ has been enhanced with new features every year. Linguists, researchers in the social sciences and, more generally, professionals who analyse texts have contributed to its development and participated in the annual NooJ conference. Since 2011, the European project Meta-Net CESAR has introduced new interest in NooJ as well as a new set of projects, both in linguistics and in computer science. The present volume contains 18 articles selected from the 32 papers presented at the International NooJ 2012 Conference which was held from June 14th to 16th at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris. These articles are organised in three parts: “Vocabulary and Morphology” contains five articles; “Syntax and Semantics” contains six articles; “NooJ Applications” contains six articles. In this volume, we decided to add a new part: eight short papers that present prototype NooJ modules developed by graduate students and that could serve as bases for more ambitious projects.