Overview of the Second BUCC Shared Task: Spotting Parallel Sentences in Comparable Corpora

Pierre Zweigenbaum, Serge Sharoff, Reinhard Rapp


Abstract
This paper presents the BUCC 2017 shared task on parallel sentence extraction from comparable corpora. It recalls the design of the datasets, presents their final construction and statistics and the methods used to evaluate system results. 13 runs were submitted to the shared task by 4 teams, covering three of the four proposed language pairs: French-English (7 runs), German-English (3 runs), and Chinese-English (3 runs). The best F-scores as measured against the gold standard were 0.84 (German-English), 0.80 (French-English), and 0.43 (Chinese-English). Because of the design of the dataset, in which not all gold parallel sentence pairs are known, these are only minimum values. We examined manually a small sample of the false negative sentence pairs for the most precise French-English runs and estimated the number of parallel sentence pairs not yet in the provided gold standard. Adding them to the gold standard leads to revised estimates for the French-English F-scores of at most +1.5pt. This suggests that the BUCC 2017 datasets provide a reasonable approximate evaluation of the parallel sentence spotting task.
Anthology ID:
W17-2512
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Serge Sharoff, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Reinhard Rapp
Venue:
BUCC
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
60–67
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2512
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-2512
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pierre Zweigenbaum, Serge Sharoff, and Reinhard Rapp. 2017. Overview of the Second BUCC Shared Task: Spotting Parallel Sentences in Comparable Corpora. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora, pages 60–67, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Overview of the Second BUCC Shared Task: Spotting Parallel Sentences in Comparable Corpora (Zweigenbaum et al., BUCC 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2512.pdf
Data
BUCC