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

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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: LREC
• Authors: Michael Mohler, Rada Mihalcea
• Keywords: Education, LREC 2008, Parallel Text Chunks, Parallel Texts, Web-gathered Parallel Texts