Document Alignment based on Overlapping Fixed-Length Segments

Xiaotian Wang, Takehito Utsuro, Masaaki Nagata


Abstract
Acquiring large-scale parallel corpora is crucial for NLP tasks such as Neural Machine Translation, and web crawling has become a popular methodology for this purpose. Previous studies have been conducted based on sentence-based segmentation (SBS) when aligning documents in various languages which are obtained through web crawling. Among them, the TK-PERT method (Thompson and Koehn, 2020) achieved state-of-the-art results and addressed the boilerplate text in web crawling data well through a down-weighting approach. However, there remains a problem with how to handle long-text encoding better. Thus, we introduce the strategy of Overlapping Fixed-Length Segmentation (OFLS) in place of SBS, and observe a pronounced enhancement when performing the same approach for document alignment. In this paper, we compare the SBS and OFLS using three previous methods, Mean-Pool, TK-PERT (Thompson and Koehn, 2020), and Optimal Transport (Clark et al., 2019; El-Kishky and Guzman, 2020), on the WMT16 document alignment shared task for French-English, as well as on our self-established Japanese-English dataset MnRN. As a result, for the WMT16 task, various SBS based methods showed an increase in recall by 1% to 10% after reproduction with OFLS. For MnRN data, OFLS demonstrated notable accuracy improvements and exhibited faster document embedding speed.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-srw.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Xiyan Fu, Eve Fleisig
Venues:
ACL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
51–61
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2024.acl-srw.10/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-srw.10
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaotian Wang, Takehito Utsuro, and Masaaki Nagata. 2024. Document Alignment based on Overlapping Fixed-Length Segments. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 51–61, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Document Alignment based on Overlapping Fixed-Length Segments (Wang et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2024.acl-srw.10.pdf