Deriving Consensus for Multi-Parallel Corpora: an English Bible Study

Patrick Xia, David Yarowsky


Abstract
What can you do with multiple noisy versions of the same text? We present a method which generates a single consensus between multi-parallel corpora. By maximizing a function of linguistic features between word pairs, we jointly learn a single corpus-wide multiway alignment: a consensus between 27 versions of the English Bible. We additionally produce English paraphrases, word-level distributions of tags, and consensus dependency parses. Our method is language independent and applicable to any multi-parallel corpora. Given the Bible’s unique role as alignable bitext for over 800 of the world’s languages, this consensus alignment and resulting resources offer value for multilingual annotation projection, and also shed potential insights into the Bible itself.
Anthology ID:
I17-2076
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2017
Address:
Taipei, Taiwan
Editors:
Greg Kondrak, Taro Watanabe
Venue:
IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing
Note:
Pages:
448–453
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/I17-2076
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Patrick Xia and David Yarowsky. 2017. Deriving Consensus for Multi-Parallel Corpora: an English Bible Study. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 448–453, Taipei, Taiwan. Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing.
Cite (Informal):
Deriving Consensus for Multi-Parallel Corpora: an English Bible Study (Xia & Yarowsky, IJCNLP 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/I17-2076.pdf
Note:
 I17-2076.Notes.pdf
Code
 pitrack/monolign