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An overview of the European Union’s highly multilingual parallel corpora

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Abstract

Starting in 2006, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and other European Union organisations have made available a number of large-scale highly-multilingual parallel language resources. In this article, we give a comparative overview of these resources and we explain the specific nature of each of them. This article provides answers to a number of question, including: What are these linguistic resources? What is the difference between them? Why were they originally created and why was the data released publicly? What can they be used for and what are the limitations of their usability? What are the text types, subject domains and languages covered? How to avoid overlapping document sets? How do they compare regarding the formatting and the translation alignment? What are their usage conditions? What other types of multilingual linguistic resources does the EU have? This article thus aims to clarify what the similarities and differences between the various resources are and what they can be used for. It will also serve as a reference publication for those resources, for which a more detailed description has been lacking so far (EAC-TM, ECDC-TM and DGT-Acquis).

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Notes

  1. All EU corpora discussed here can be downloaded from https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/language-technologies.

  2. See https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/. All URLs were last visited on 7 February 2014.

  3. For details, see https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/research-topic/internet-surveillance-systems.

  4. The EMM websites can be accessed publicly via http://emm.newsbrief.eu/overview.html.

  5. See http://www.statmt.org/europarl/.

  6. See http://aune.lpl.univ-aix.fr/projects/multext/.

  7. See http://nl.ijs.si/ME/.

  8. See http://opus.lingfil.uu.se.

  9. See http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32003L0098:EN:NOT for details and to read the full text of the regulation.

  10. See http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2011:330:0039:0042:EN:PDF.

  11. See http://www.meta-net.eu/whitepapers/key-results-and-cross-language-comparison.

  12. See http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0787820/bible/ for the more recent distribution of an aligned Bible corpus that is much larger than that prepared by Resnik et al. (1999).

  13. See the META-NET report http://www.meta-net.eu/whitepapers/key-results-and-cross-language-comparison.

  14. See http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2003:103:0001:0031:EN:PDF.

  15. See http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2009:134:0001:0269:en:PDF.

  16. See http://eurovoc.europa.eu/.

  17. See http://www.euromatrix.net/ and http://www.euromatrixplus.net/.

  18. Events dedicated to building and exploiting parallel corpora are, for instance, the workshop series on ‘Annotation and exploitation of parallel corpora’ (e.g. http://www.bultreebank.org/AEPC2/); ‘Slavic parallel corpora’ (http://www.slavistik.uni-mainz.de/606.php); ‘Parallel corpora and linguistic theory’ (http://paralleltext.info/sle2013/); ‘Annotation and Alignment of parallel corpora for linguistic research’ (http://www.dagstuhl.de/13043); ‘ATA-AMTA Workshop on users and uses for parallel corpora’ (http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.corpora/11156); and ‘Workshop on building and using parallel texts: data-driven machine translation and beyond’ (http://www.statmt.org/wpt05/). The CLEF Initiative and its evaluation labs are also highly relevant for this field (http://www.clef-initiative.eu/).

  19. The 24 official EU languages as of January 2014 are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish. We use the two-digit ISO codes to represent the languages.

  20. See http://www.cesar-project.net/.

  21. The META-Share download page is http://meta-share.ffzg.hr/repository/browse/croatian-translations-of-acquis/547866326c1811e28a985ef2e4e6c59e6758e8d15e7a445e9471e185a758b50c/.

  22. http://publications.europa.eu/code/pdf/370000en.htm#fn4-2.

  23. See http://formex.publications.europa.eu/formex-4/formex-4.htm.

  24. The structure of CELEX document numbers is explained at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/tools/faq.htm#1.12.

  25. At http://pelcra.pl/res/parallel/word-aligned/, for instance, Polish-English word alignments can be found.

  26. The Vanilla software used implements the Gale and Church (1993) alignment algorithm.

  27. While the Vanilla alignment was performed at the JRC, the separate HunAlign alignment was carried out by the Media Research Centre at Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The Romanian documents were collected and pre-processed by the Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the Romanian Academy of Sciences.

  28. See http://publications.europa.eu/official/index_en.htm for more information on the Official Journal.

  29. See http://www.prompsit.com/.

  30. See http://dragoman.org/muset/ for details.

  31. See http://www.europarl.europa.eu/.

  32. http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.php?id=197.

  33. For details on ECDC, see http://www.ecdc.europa.eu.

  34. For details on DG EAC, see http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/.

  35. See http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/tools/faq.htm#1.2.

  36. See http://eur-lex.europa.eu/.

  37. See http://iate.europa.eu/.

  38. See http://eurovoc.europa.eu/.

  39. See http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/publications/.

  40. i.e. the Ukrainian boxer and politician, see http://emm.newsexplorer.eu/NewsExplorer/entities/en/19011.html.

  41. For download and more information, see http://datahub.io/dataset/jrc-names.

  42. See https://open-data.europa.eu/. Quote extracted on 7 February 2014.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Commission – Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy

    Ralf Steinberger

  2. Cognizant-SetCon GmbH, Munich, Germany

    Mohamed Ebrahim

  3. Lionbridge Technologies, Inc, Tampere, Finland

    Alexandros Poulis

  4. European Commission – Directorate General for Translation (DGT), Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Manuel Carrasco-Benitez & Patrick Schlüter

  5. European Commission – Directorate General Education And Culture (EAC), Brussels, Belgium

    Marek Przybyszewski

  6. European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), Stockholm, Sweden

    Signe Gilbro

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  1. Ralf Steinberger
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  2. Mohamed Ebrahim
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  3. Alexandros Poulis
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  4. Manuel Carrasco-Benitez
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  6. Marek Przybyszewski
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  7. Signe Gilbro
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Correspondence to Ralf Steinberger.

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Steinberger, R., Ebrahim, M., Poulis, A. et al. An overview of the European Union’s highly multilingual parallel corpora. Lang Resources & Evaluation 48, 679–707 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-014-9277-0

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