Velayuthan Menan


2024

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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
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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.