We describe the European Language Resource Infrastructure (ELRI), a decentralised network to help collect, prepare and share language resources. The infrastructure was developed within a project co-funded by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, and has been deployed in the four Member States participating in the project, namely France, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. ELRI provides sustainable and flexible means to collect and share language resources via National Relay Stations, to which members of public institutions can freely subscribe. The infrastructure includes fully automated data processing engines to facilitate the preparation, sharing and wider reuse of useful language resources that can help optimise human and automated translation services in the European Union.

We describe the first experimental results in neural machine translation for Basque. As a synthetic language featuring agglutinative morphology, an extended case system, complex verbal morphology and relatively free word order, Basque presents a large number of challenging characteristics for machine translation in general, and for data-driven approaches such as attentionbased encoder-decoder models in particular. We present our results on a large range of experiments in Basque-Spanish translation, comparing several neural machine translation system variants with both rule-based and statistical machine translation systems. We demonstrate that significant gains can be obtained with a neural network approach for this challenging language pair, and describe optimal configurations in terms of word segmentation and decoding parameters, measured against test sets that feature multiple references to account for word order variability.

We describe the European Language Resources Infrastructure project, whose main aim is the provision of an infrastructure to help collect, prepare and share language resources that can in turn improve translation services in Europe.

We describe Vicomtech’s participation in the WMT 2018 shared task on quality estimation, for which we submitted minimalist quality estimators. The core of our approach is based on two simple features: lexical translation overlaps and language model cross-entropy scores. These features are exploited in two system variants: uMQE is an unsupervised system, where the final quality score is obtained by averaging individual feature scores; sMQE is a supervised variant, where the final score is estimated by a Support Vector Regressor trained on the available annotated datasets. The main goal of our minimalist approach to quality estimation is to provide reliable estimators that require minimal deployment effort, few resources, and, in the case of uMQE, do not depend on costly data annotation or post-editing. Our approach was applied to all language pairs in sentence quality estimation, obtaining competitive results across the board.

We describe Vicomtech’s participation in the WMT 2018 Shared Task on parallel corpus filtering. We aimed to evaluate a simple approach to the task, which can efficiently process large volumes of data and can be easily deployed for new datasets in different language pairs and domains. We based our approach on STACC, an efficient and portable method for parallel sentence identification in comparable corpora. To address the specifics of the corpus filtering task, which features significant volumes of noisy data, the core method was expanded with a penalty based on the amount of unknown words in sentence pairs. Additionally, we experimented with a complementary data saturation method based on source sentence n-grams, with the goal of demoting parallel sentence pairs that do not contribute significant amounts of yet unobserved n-grams. Our approach requires no prior training and is highly efficient on the type of large datasets featured in the corpus filtering task. We achieved competitive results with this simple and portable method, ranking in the top half among competing systems overall.

This article presents the STACCw system for the BUCC 2017 shared task on parallel sentence extraction from comparable corpora. The original STACC approach, based on set-theoretic operations over bags of words, had been previously shown to be efficient and portable across domains and alignment scenarios. Wedescribe an extension of this approach with a new weighting scheme and show that it provides significant improvements on the datasets provided for the shared task.

This article describes a large comparable corpus for Basque and Spanish and the methods employed to build a parallel resource from the original data. The EITB corpus, a strongly comparable corpus in the news domain, is to be shared with the research community, as an aid for the development and testing of methods in comparable corpora exploitation, and as basis for the improvement of data-driven machine translation systems for this language pair. Competing approaches were explored for the alignment of comparable segments in the corpus, resulting in the design of a simple method which outperformed a state-of-the-art method on the corpus test sets. The method we present is highly portable, computationally efficient, and significantly reduces deployment work, a welcome result for the exploitation of comparable corpora.

In this paper we focus on the creation of general-purpose (as opposed to domain-specific) polarity lexicons in five languages: French, Italian, Dutch, English and Spanish using WordNet propagation. WordNet propagation is a commonly used method to generate these lexicons as it gives high coverage of general purpose language and the semantically rich WordNets where concepts are organised in synonym , antonym and hyperonym/hyponym structures seem to be well suited to the identification of positive and negative words. However, WordNets of different languages may vary in many ways such as the way they are compiled, the number of synsets, number of synonyms and number of semantic relations they include. In this study we investigate whether this variability translates into differences of performance when these WordNets are used for polarity propagation. Although many variants of the propagation method are developed for English, little is known about how they perform with WordNets of other languages. We implemented a propagation algorithm and designed a method to obtain seed lists similar with respect to quality and size, for each of the five languages. We evaluated the results against gold standards also developed according to a common method in order to achieve as less variance as possible between the different languages.