Christina Pollkläsener
2026
EPIC-EuroParl-UdS: Information-Theoretic Perspectives on Translation and Interpreting
Maria Kunilovskaya | Christina Pollkläsener
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Maria Kunilovskaya | Christina Pollkläsener
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
This paper introduces an updated and combined version of the bidirectional English–German EPIC-UdS (spoken) and EuroParl-UdS (written) corpora containing original European Parliament speeches as well as their translations and interpretations. The new version corrects metadata and text errors identified through previous use, refines the content, updates linguistic annotations, and adds new layers, including word alignment and word-level surprisal indices. The combined resource is designed to support research using information-theoretic approaches to language variation, particularly studies comparing written and spoken modes, and examining disfluencies in speech, as well as traditional translationese studies, including parallel (source vs. target) and comparable (original vs. translated) analyses. The paper outlines the updates introduced in this release, summarises previous results based on the corpus, and presents a new illustrative study. The study validates the integrity of the rebuilt spoken data and evaluates probabilistic measures derived from base and fine-tuned GPT-2 and machine translation models on the task of filler particles prediction in interpreting.
2023
Investigating Explicitation of Discourse Connectives in Translation using Automatic Annotations
Frances Yung | Merel Scholman | Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski | Christina Pollkläsener | Vera Demberg
Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Frances Yung | Merel Scholman | Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski | Christina Pollkläsener | Vera Demberg
Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Discourse relations have different patterns of marking across different languages. As a result, discourse connectives are often added, omitted, or rephrased in translation. Prior work has shown a tendency for explicitation of discourse connectives, but such work was conducted using restricted sample sizes due to difficulty of connective identification and alignment. The current study exploits automatic methods to facilitate a large-scale study of connectives in English and German parallel texts. Our results based on over 300 types and 18000 instances of aligned connectives and an empirical approach to compare the cross-lingual specificity gap provide strong evidence of the Explicitation Hypothesis. We conclude that discourse relations are indeed more explicit in translation than texts written originally in the same language. Automatic annotations allow us to carry out translation studies of discourse relations on a large scale. Our methodology using relative entropy to study the specificity of connectives also provides more fine-grained insights into translation patterns.