Quality Does Matter: A Detailed Look at the Quality and Utility of Web-Mined Parallel Corpora

Surangika Ranathunga, Nisansa De Silva, Velayuthan Menan, Aloka Fernando, Charitha Rathnayake


Abstract
We conducted a detailed analysis on the quality of web-mined corpora for two low-resource languages (making three language pairs, English-Sinhala, English-Tamil and Sinhala-Tamil). We ranked each corpus according to a similarity measure and carried out an intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation on different portions of this ranked corpus. We show that there are significant quality differences between different portions of web-mined corpora and that the quality varies across languages and datasets. We also show that, for some web-mined datasets, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models trained with their highest-ranked 25k portion can be on par with human-curated datasets.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-long.52
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
860–880
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.52
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Surangika Ranathunga, Nisansa De Silva, Velayuthan Menan, Aloka Fernando, and Charitha Rathnayake. 2024. Quality Does Matter: A Detailed Look at the Quality and Utility of Web-Mined Parallel Corpora. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 860–880, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Quality Does Matter: A Detailed Look at the Quality and Utility of Web-Mined Parallel Corpora (Ranathunga et al., EACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.52.pdf