How comparable are parallel corpora? Measuring the distribution of general vocabulary and connectives

Authors:
Bruno Cartoni;Sandrine Zufferey;Thomas Meyer;Andrei Popescu-Belis
Affiliations:
University of Geneva, rue de Candolle, Geneva;University of Geneva, rue de Candolle, Geneva;Idiap Research Institute, Rue Marconi, Martigny;Idiap Research Institute, Rue Marconi, Martigny
Venue:
BUCC '11 Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora: Comparable Corpora and the Web
Year:
2011

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Abstract

In this paper, we question the homogeneity of a large parallel corpus by measuring the similarity between various sub-parts. We compare results obtained using a general measure of lexical similarity based on χ2 and by counting the number of discourse connectives. We argue that discourse connectives provide a more sensitive measure, revealing differences that are not visible with the general measure. We also provide evidence for the existence of specific characteristics defining translated texts as opposed to non-translated ones, due to a universal tendency for explicitation.