Marta Bañón


2022

pdf
MaCoCu: Massive collection and curation of monolingual and bilingual data: focus on under-resourced languages
Marta Bañón | Miquel Esplà-Gomis | Mikel L. Forcada | Cristian García-Romero | Taja Kuzman | Nikola Ljubešić | Rik van Noord | Leopoldo Pla Sempere | Gema Ramírez-Sánchez | Peter Rupnik | Vít Suchomel | Antonio Toral | Tobias van der Werff | Jaume Zaragoza
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

We introduce the project “MaCoCu: Massive collection and curation of monolingual and bilingual data: focus on under-resourced languages”, funded by the Connecting Europe Facility, which is aimed at building monolingual and parallel corpora for under-resourced European languages. The approach followed consists of crawling large amounts of textual data from carefully selected top-level domains of the Internet, and then applying a curation and enrichment pipeline. In addition to corpora, the project will release successive versions of the free/open-source web crawling and curation software used.

pdf
Bicleaner AI: Bicleaner Goes Neural
Jaume Zaragoza-Bernabeu | Gema Ramírez-Sánchez | Marta Bañón | Sergio Ortiz Rojas
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper describes the experiments carried out during the development of the latest version of Bicleaner, named Bicleaner AI, a tool that aims at detecting noisy sentences in parallel corpora. The tool, which now implements a new neural classifier, uses state-of-the-art techniques based on pre-trained transformer-based language models fine-tuned on a binary classification task. After that, parallel corpus filtering is performed, discarding the sentences that have lower probability of being mutual translations. Our experiments, based on the training of neural machine translation (NMT) with corpora filtered using Bicleaner AI for two different scenarios, show significant improvements in translation quality compared to the previous version of the tool which implemented a classifier based on Extremely Randomized Trees.

pdf
Human evaluation of web-crawled parallel corpora for machine translation
Gema Ramírez-Sánchez | Marta Bañón | Jaume Zaragoza-Bernabeu | Sergio Ortiz Rojas
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems (HumEval)

Quality assessment has been an ongoing activity of the series of ParaCrawl efforts to crawl massive amounts of parallel data from multilingual websites for 29 languages. The goal of ParaCrawl is to get parallel data that is good for machine translation. To prove so, both, automatic (extrinsic) and human (intrinsic and extrinsic) evaluation tasks have been included as part of the quality assessment activity of the project. We sum up the various methods followed to address these evaluation tasks for the web-crawled corpora produced and their results. We review their advantages and disadvantages for the final goal of the ParaCrawl project and the related ongoing project MaCoCu.

2020

pdf
ParaCrawl: Web-Scale Acquisition of Parallel Corpora
Marta Bañón | Pinzhen Chen | Barry Haddow | Kenneth Heafield | Hieu Hoang | Miquel Esplà-Gomis | Mikel L. Forcada | Amir Kamran | Faheem Kirefu | Philipp Koehn | Sergio Ortiz Rojas | Leopoldo Pla Sempere | Gema Ramírez-Sánchez | Elsa Sarrías | Marek Strelec | Brian Thompson | William Waites | Dion Wiggins | Jaume Zaragoza
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We report on methods to create the largest publicly available parallel corpora by crawling the web, using open source software. We empirically compare alternative methods and publish benchmark data sets for sentence alignment and sentence pair filtering. We also describe the parallel corpora released and evaluate their quality and their usefulness to create machine translation systems.

pdf
Bifixer and Bicleaner: two open-source tools to clean your parallel data
Gema Ramírez-Sánchez | Jaume Zaragoza-Bernabeu | Marta Bañón | Sergio Ortiz Rojas
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

This paper shows the utility of two open-source tools designed for parallel data cleaning: Bifixer and Bicleaner. Already used to clean highly noisy parallel content from crawled multilingual websites, we evaluate their performance in a different scenario: cleaning publicly available corpora commonly used to train machine translation systems. We choose four English–Portuguese corpora which we plan to use internally to compute paraphrases at a later stage. We clean the four corpora using both tools, which are described in detail, and analyse the effect of some of the cleaning steps on them. We then compare machine translation training times and quality before and after cleaning these corpora, showing a positive impact particularly for the noisiest ones.

2018

pdf
Prompsit’s submission to WMT 2018 Parallel Corpus Filtering shared task
Víctor M. Sánchez-Cartagena | Marta Bañón | Sergio Ortiz-Rojas | Gema Ramírez
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers

This paper describes Prompsit Language Engineering’s submissions to the WMT 2018 parallel corpus filtering shared task. Our four submissions were based on an automatic classifier for identifying pairs of sentences that are mutual translations. A set of hand-crafted hard rules for discarding sentences with evident flaws were applied before the classifier. We explored different strategies for achieving a training corpus with diverse vocabulary and fluent sentences: language model scoring, an active-learning-inspired data selection algorithm and n-gram saturation. Our submissions were very competitive in comparison with other participants on the 100 million word training corpus.