This article presents a discourse annotation methodology based on Rhetorical Structure Theory and an empirical study of annotating a corpus of specialized medical texts in Basque. The annotation process includes two phases: segmentation and annotation of rhetorical relations. Phase one entails an initial study which leads to establishing linguistic criteria for sentence-based segmentation; a second phase focuses on annotation of rhetorical relations. After establishing discourse segments and rhetorical relations, the annotation process is analyzed and evaluated by means of the method commonly used in RST (Marcu 2000). Inconsistencies detected in the evaluation method lead the authors to redefine some criteria of the evaluation method. As a result of this work, a small annotated Basque-language corpus is provided to scientific community.

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We present the first publicly available machine translation (MT) system for Basque. The fact that Basque is both a morphologically rich and less-resourced language makes the use of statistical approaches difficult, and raises the need to develop a rule-based architecture which can be combined in the future with statistical techniques. The MT architecture proposed reuses several open-source tools and is based on a unique XML format to facilitate the flow between the different modules, which eases the interaction among different developers of tools and resources. The result is the rule-based Matxin MT system, an open-source toolkit, whose first implementation translates from Spanish to Basque. We have performed innovative work on the following tasks: construction of a dependency analyser for Spanish, use of rich linguistic information to translate prepositions and syntactic functions (such as subject and object markers), construction of an efficient module for verbal chunk transfer, and design and implementation of modules for ordering words and phrases, independently of the source language.

This paper presents preliminary experiments in the use of translation equivalences to disambiguate prepositions or case suffixes. The core of the method is to find translations of the occurrence of the target preposition or case suffix, and assign the intersection of their set of interpretations. Given a table with prepositions and their possible interpretations, the method is fully automatic. We have tested this method on the occurrences of the Basque instrumental case -z in the definitions of a Basque dictionary, looking for the translations in the definitions from 3 Spanish and 3 English dictionaries. The results have been that we are able to disambiguate with 94.5% accuracy 2.3% of those occurrences (up to 91). The ambiguity is reduced from 7 readings down to 3.1. The results are very encouraging given the simple techniques used, and show great potential for improvement.

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