Vietnamese is spoken by about 80 millions people around the world, yet very few concrete works on this language have been noticed in Natural Language Processing (NLP) until now. Neither tools nor language resources are shared in public research. Except a few works carried out on English to Vietnamese, research in this domain has not until recently raised much attention amongst the scientific community in Vietnam. | Developing Tools and Building Linguistic Resources for Vietnamese Morpho-Syntactic Processing Thanh Bon Nguyen (1), Thi Minh Huyen Nguyen (2) Laurent Romary (2), Xuan Luong Vu (3) (1) IFI, Hanoi - ntbon@ (2) LORIA, Nancy - nguyen@, romary@ (3) Vietnam Lexicography Centre, Hanoi - vuluong@ Abstract Vietnamese is spoken by about 80 millions people around the world, yet very few concrete works on this language have been noticed in Natural Language Processing (NLP) until now. The fundamental problems in automatic analysis of Vietnamese, such as part-of-speech (POS) tagging, parsing, etc. are extremely difficult due to the lack of formal linguistic knowledge on one hand, and the specificities of isolating languages on the other hand. In this paper we present our efforts to develop a set of tools permitting the construction and management of language resources for Vietnamese in a normalized framework, whose aim is to be largely distributed and usable for research purposes in NLP. We first define a tagset by constructing Vietnamese morpho-syntactic descriptors that fit in a model compatible with MULTEXT1, so as to account for possible multilingual applications as well as the reusability of defined tagsets. We then implement a system undertaking the tasks of word segmentation and POS tagging. Our system ensures a representation format of linguistic resources that is currently considered in the framework of ISO TC37 SC42. Finally we attempt to construct a formal syntactic description of nominal groups using the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) formalism. Introduction Vietnamese is spoken by about 80 millions people around the world, yet very few concrete works on this language have been noticed in Natural Language Processing (NLP) until now. Neither tools nor language resources are shared in public research. Except a few works carried out on English to Vietnamese, research in this domain has not until recently raised much attention amongst .
