The web as a platform to build machine translation resources

Abstract

In the last few years, the World Wide Web has changed tremendously. Now accessible to millions of users from hundreds of countries, it has started to show new online behaviors. Following the new patterns we now see many multilingual activities going on in large scales. In this paper, we provide an analysis on how this emerging usage patterns can affect the Machine Translation community. We identify the main motivations behind these activity patterns. Using examples we compare the traditional approaches to resource collection to new online-based approaches. We then present our experimental results of an online community designed to collect parallel corpora.

The case of InterCorp, a multilingual parallel corpus

“…In the latter approaches, translation is viewed as a bridge to carry linguistic knowledge across languages rather than simply a set of links between equivalent sentences or word forms. Significant developments also concern the process of acquiring a parallel corpus from the web (Razavian & Vogel 2009). Probably the most striking example of the use of such texts in machine translation is the Google Translate tool, extracting translation equivalents from multilingual sites.…”