languageover

Languageover is a term used in linguistic computing to describe an overlay-based approach to processing multilingual text. It envisions a language-agnostic abstract layer that sits above language-specific representations, allowing tools to operate on a unified representation instead of each language separately. In practice, languageover defines constructs for mapping tokens, lemmas, syntactic relations, and semantic roles from diverse languages into a shared intermediate form, and for realizing language-specific output from that form.

Core components include an alignment module that links cross-language equivalents, a universal representation for semantic roles, and a transfer/realization module that applies language-specific realizations. A pluggable repository of rules and data supports new language pairs. The architecture supports partial transfer when complete alignment is unavailable, aiding multilingual processing for low-resource languages.

Applications include machine translation, cross-lingual information retrieval, multilingual text generation, and comparative linguistics. Languageover aims to simplify multilingual pipelines by providing a common API and data model across languages.

History and status: the term appeared in scholarly discussions in the 2010s and has been explored in several prototype toolchains within research groups. It remains a niche concept rather than a formal standard, with ongoing work on data sparsity, evaluation, and scalability.

Reception: proponents cite clearer design and improved interoperability; critics note added complexity and potential gaps between languages with divergent grammars.