The Johns Hopkins University Bible Corpus: 1600+ Tongues for Typological Exploration
Arya D. McCarthy, Rachel Wicks, Dylan Lewis, Aaron Mueller, Winston Wu, Oliver Adams, Garrett Nicolai, Matt Post, David Yarowsky
Abstract
We present findings from the creation of a massively parallel corpus in over 1600 languages, the Johns Hopkins University Bible Corpus (JHUBC). The corpus consists of over 4000 unique translations of the Christian Bible and counting. Our data is derived from scraping several online resources and merging them with existing corpora, combining them under a common scheme that is verse-parallel across all translations. We detail our effort to scrape, clean, align, and utilize this ripe multilingual dataset. The corpus captures the great typological variety of the world’s languages. We catalog this by showing highly similar proportions of representation of Ethnologue’s typological features in our corpus. We also give an example application: projecting pronoun features like clusivity across alignments to richly annotate languages which do not mark the distinction.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.lrec-1.352
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Marseille, France
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2884–2892
- Language:
- English
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.352
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Arya D. McCarthy, Rachel Wicks, Dylan Lewis, Aaron Mueller, Winston Wu, Oliver Adams, Garrett Nicolai, Matt Post, and David Yarowsky. 2020. The Johns Hopkins University Bible Corpus: 1600+ Tongues for Typological Exploration. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2884–2892, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
- Cite (Informal):
- The Johns Hopkins University Bible Corpus: 1600+ Tongues for Typological Exploration (McCarthy et al., LREC 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.lrec-1.352.pdf