@inproceedings{ranathunga-etal-2025-improving,
title = "Improving the Quality of Web-mined Parallel Corpora of Low-Resource Languages using Debiasing Heuristics",
author = "Ranathunga, Surangika and
Fernando, Aloka and
Velayuthan, Menan and
Rathnayaka, Charitha and
de Silva, Nisansa",
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1435/",
pages = "28252--28269",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
abstract = "Parallel Data Curation (PDC) techniques aim to filter out noisy parallel sentences from web-mined corpora. Ranking sentence pairs using similarity scores on sentence embeddings derived from Pre-trained Multilingual Language Models (multiPLMs) is the most common PDC technique. However, previous research has shown that the choice of the multiPLM significantly impacts the quality of the filtered parallel corpus, and the Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models trained using such data show a disparity across multiPLMs. This paper shows that this disparity is due to different multiPLMs being biased towards certain types of sentence pairs, which are treated as noise from an NMT point of view. We show that such noisy parallel sentences can be removed to a certain extent by employing a series of heuristics. The NMT models, trained using the curated corpus, lead to producing better results while minimizing the disparity across multiPLMs. We publicly release the source code and the curated datasets"
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="ranathunga-etal-2025-improving">
<titleInfo>
<title>Improving the Quality of Web-mined Parallel Corpora of Low-Resource Languages using Debiasing Heuristics</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Surangika</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Ranathunga</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Aloka</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Fernando</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Menan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Velayuthan</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Charitha</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Rathnayaka</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Nisansa</namePart>
<namePart type="family">de Silva</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2025-11</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Christos</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Christodoulopoulos</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Tanmoy</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Chakraborty</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Carolyn</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Rose</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Violet</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Peng</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Suzhou, China</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-332-6</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Parallel Data Curation (PDC) techniques aim to filter out noisy parallel sentences from web-mined corpora. Ranking sentence pairs using similarity scores on sentence embeddings derived from Pre-trained Multilingual Language Models (multiPLMs) is the most common PDC technique. However, previous research has shown that the choice of the multiPLM significantly impacts the quality of the filtered parallel corpus, and the Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models trained using such data show a disparity across multiPLMs. This paper shows that this disparity is due to different multiPLMs being biased towards certain types of sentence pairs, which are treated as noise from an NMT point of view. We show that such noisy parallel sentences can be removed to a certain extent by employing a series of heuristics. The NMT models, trained using the curated corpus, lead to producing better results while minimizing the disparity across multiPLMs. We publicly release the source code and the curated datasets</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">ranathunga-etal-2025-improving</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1435/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2025-11</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>28252</start>
<end>28269</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Improving the Quality of Web-mined Parallel Corpora of Low-Resource Languages using Debiasing Heuristics
%A Ranathunga, Surangika
%A Fernando, Aloka
%A Velayuthan, Menan
%A Rathnayaka, Charitha
%A de Silva, Nisansa
%Y Christodoulopoulos, Christos
%Y Chakraborty, Tanmoy
%Y Rose, Carolyn
%Y Peng, Violet
%S Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2025
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Suzhou, China
%@ 979-8-89176-332-6
%F ranathunga-etal-2025-improving
%X Parallel Data Curation (PDC) techniques aim to filter out noisy parallel sentences from web-mined corpora. Ranking sentence pairs using similarity scores on sentence embeddings derived from Pre-trained Multilingual Language Models (multiPLMs) is the most common PDC technique. However, previous research has shown that the choice of the multiPLM significantly impacts the quality of the filtered parallel corpus, and the Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models trained using such data show a disparity across multiPLMs. This paper shows that this disparity is due to different multiPLMs being biased towards certain types of sentence pairs, which are treated as noise from an NMT point of view. We show that such noisy parallel sentences can be removed to a certain extent by employing a series of heuristics. The NMT models, trained using the curated corpus, lead to producing better results while minimizing the disparity across multiPLMs. We publicly release the source code and the curated datasets
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1435/
%P 28252-28269
Markdown (Informal)
[Improving the Quality of Web-mined Parallel Corpora of Low-Resource Languages using Debiasing Heuristics](https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1435/) (Ranathunga et al., EMNLP 2025)
ACL