The Acadian Nool module: Automatic processing of a regional oral French

Automated analysis of oral corpora is still in its infancy. Interest is growing, but tools are still scarce. This article presents processing tools that we have developed to analyze corpora of spontaneous oral speech in Acadian French. This variety of French spoken in the Maritime Provinces of Canada has three levels of characteristics: oral, regional, and mixed language traits. The challenge was to adapt an existing processing tool, INTEXlNooJ, to find solutions to the problems presented by our corpora. We will present three different solutions developed with NooJ: (1) the configuration of dictionary entries that allows users to relate the orthographic and lexical representations of a word coming from standard French, traditional Acadian, English, or the vernacular; (2) grammars developed to process morphological characteristics of nominal and verbal inflections; and (3) a disambiguation graph for a, which is the 3SG pronoun in Acadian French as well as the 3SG.PRES of the auxiliary avoir.