Babylon Parallel Text Builder: Gathering Parallel Texts for Low-Density Languages

Michael Mohler, Rada Mihalcea


Abstract
This paper describes Babylon, a system that attempts to overcome the shortage of parallel texts in low-density languages by supplementing existing parallel texts with texts gathered automatically from the Web. In addition to the identification of entire Web pages, we also propose a new feature specifically designed to find parallel text chunks within a single document. Experiments carried out on the Quechua-Spanish language pair show that the system is successful in automatically identifying a significant amount of parallel texts on the Web. Evaluations of a machine translation system trained on this corpus indicate that the Web-gathered parallel texts can supplement manually compiled parallel texts and perform significantly better than the manually compiled texts when tested on other Web-gathered data.
Anthology ID:
L08-1060
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/313_paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael Mohler and Rada Mihalcea. 2008. Babylon Parallel Text Builder: Gathering Parallel Texts for Low-Density Languages. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Babylon Parallel Text Builder: Gathering Parallel Texts for Low-Density Languages (Mohler & Mihalcea, LREC 2008)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/313_paper.pdf