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From: inc@fluke.UUCP (Gary Benson)
Newsgroups: net.internat,net.nlang
Subject: Re: Texts in other languages
Message-ID: <738@tpvax.fluke.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 2-Dec-85 13:45:20 EST
Article-I.D.: tpvax.738
Posted: Mon Dec  2 13:45:20 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 3-Dec-85 20:21:00 EST
References: <517@harvard.UUCP>
Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., Everett, WA
Lines: 34
Keywords: Standard texts, compression
Xref: watmath net.internat:106 net.nlang:3828

> For an experiment in text compression, I would find it useful to have
> a collection of texts in a variety of languages.  Ideally, I would
> like a half-dozen distinct texts, each 2000-15000 words long, in each
> language.  The texts should be in a consistent (documented)
> transcription, preferably without formatting commands.  The texts need
> not be selected to be `representative' of the language.  For instance,
> technical papers are fine.  The languages in which I am interested are
> French, Italian, German, (Modern) Greek, Arabic, and Turkish.  If you
> have texts in other languages, please let me know.
> 
> If you could send me mail describing the texts you might be able to
> provide, we can find some way of transferring them later.
> 
>   Thanks
> 	-s
> 
> 	Macrakis@Harvard.{Harvard.EDU,ARPA,uucp,csnet}
> 		@Harvunxh.bitnet

When Xerox bought Diablo and got into the high-speed character printer
business, they used a computer to generate a paragraph of "standard
English text". It was nonsense to read of course, but contained 
the proper distribution of letters, word lengths, and sentence lengths.
They used the text to time their printers. Why not use a "standard
text" from each of the languages you are interested in? It seems to me
that way you would get a clearer picture of the perfomance of a compression
algorithm *on text in the language of interest* than you will with a
transcription, which to my mind at least is really just a term meaning
a translation.

-- 
 Gary Benson  *  John Fluke Mfg. Co.  *  PO Box C9090  *  Everett WA  *  98206
   MS/232-E  = =   {allegra} {uw-beaver} !fluke!inc   = =   (206)356-5367
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