The combined research on treebanks and parallel corpora has recently led to parallel treebanks. A parallel treebank consists of syntactically annotated sentences in two or more languages, taken from translated (i.e. parallel) documents. In addition, the syntax trees of two corresponding sentences are aligned on a sub-sentential level. This means word level, phrase level and clause level. Parallel treebanks can be used as training or evaluation corpora for word and phrase alignment, as input for example-based machine translation (EBMT), as training corpora for transfer rules, or for translation studies.

This Symposium brings together researchers who work on the automatic annotation and exploitation of parallel corpora. Their focus varies from Machine Translation, Alignment, Parsing, Grammar Extraction to Translation Studies. But they are all interested in how to best represent and take advantage of the information provided by parallel texts. They use statistical and linguistic methods to process natural language corpora and to extract interesting knowledge from them.