9th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora

 

 

INVITED SPEAKERS

 

 

Ruslan Mitkov

 

 

Comparable corpora are the most versatile and valuable resource for multilingual Natural Language Processing. The speaker will argue that comparable corpora can support a wider range of applications than has been demonstrated so far in the state of the art. The talk will present completed and ongoing work conducted by the speaker and colleagues from his research group where comparable corpora are employed for different tasks including but not limited to the identification of cognates and false friends, validation of translation universals, language change and translation of multiword expressions.

 

Gregory Grefenstette

 

 

Comparable Corpora have been used to improve statistical machine translation, for augmenting linked open data, for finding terminology equivalents, and to create other linguistic resources for natural language processing and language learning applications. Recently, continuous vector space models, creating and exploiting word embeddings, have been gaining in popularity in more powerful solutions to creating, and sometimes replacing, these resources. Both classical comparable corpora solutions and vector space models require the presence of a large quantity of multilingual content. In this talk, we will discuss the breadth of this content on the internet to provide some type of intuition in how successful comparable corpus approaches will be in achieving its goals of providing multilingual and cross lingual resources. We examine current estimates of language presence and growth on the web, and of the availability of the type of resources needed to continue and extend comparable corpus research.