12th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora

Research on comparable corpora is active but used to be scattered among many workshops and conferences. Hence this workshop series, which bundles this research and gives it a better platform. In the language engineering and the linguistics communities, research in comparable corpora has been motivated by two main reasons. In language engineering, on the one hand, it is chiefly motivated by the need to use comparable corpora as training data for statistical NLP applications such as statistical machine translation or cross-lingual retrieval. In linguistics, on the other hand, comparable corpora are of interest in themselves by making possible inter-linguistic discoveries and comparisons. It is generally accepted in both communities that comparable corpora are documents in one or several languages that are comparable in content and form in various degrees and dimensions.

Comparable corpora have been used in a range of applications, including, Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Cross-lingual text classification, etc. We believe that the linguistic definitions and observations related to comparable corpora can improve methods to mine such corpora for applications of statistical NLP, for example to extract parallel corpora from comparable corpora for neural MT. As such, it is of great interest to bring together builders and users of such corpora.