Alignment of comparable documents: Comparison of similarity measures on French–English–Arabic data

• Published in: Natural language engineering 2018-09, Vol.24 (5), p.677-694
• Main Authors: LANGLOIS, D., SAAD, M., SMAILI, K.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Alignment; Arabic language; Bilingualism; Computation and Language; Computer Science; Corpus linguistics; Dictionaries; English language; Experiments; French language; Information sources; Multilingualism; Natural language processing; Obama, Barack; Recall; Semantics; Similarity measures; Translation; Translations; Websites
• ISSN: 1351-3249; 1469-8110
• DOI: 10.1017/S1351324918000232

The objective, in this article, is to address the issue of the comparability of documents, which are extracted from different sources and written in different languages. These documents are not necessarily translations of each other. This material is referred as multilingual comparable corpora. These language resources are useful for multilingual natural language processing applications, especially for low-resourced language pairs. In this paper, we collect different data in Arabic, English, and French. Two corpora are built by using available hyperlinks for Wikipedia and Euronews. Euronews is an aligned multilingual (Arabic, English, and French) corpus of 34k documents collected from Euronews website. A more challenging issue is to build comparable corpus from two different and independent media having two distinct editorial lines, such as British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Al Jazeera (JSC). To build such corpus, we propose to use the Cross-Lingual Latent Semantic approach. For this purpose, documents have been harvested from BBC and JSC websites for each month of the years 2012 and 2013. The comparability is calculated for each Arabic–English couple of documents of each month. This automatic task is then validated by hand. This led to a multilingual (Arabic–English) aligned corpus of 305 pairs of documents (233k English words and 137k Arabic words). In addition, a study is presented in this paper to analyze the performance of three methods of the literature allowing to measure the comparability of documents on the multilingual reference corpora. A recall at rank 1 of 50.16 per cent is achieved with the Cross-lingual LSI approach for BBC–JSC test corpus, while the dictionary-based method reaches a recall of only 35.41 per cent.