Using the Europarl corpus for linguistic research

Europarl is a large multilingual corpus containing the minutes of the debates at the European Parliament. This article presents a method to extract different corpora from Europarl: monolingual and multilingual comparable corpora, as well as parallel corpora. Using state-of-the-art measures of homogeneity, we show that these corpora are very similar. In addition, we argue that they present many advantages for research in various fields of linguistics and translation studies, and we also discuss some of their limitations. We conclude by reviewing a number of previous studies that made use of these corpora, emphasizing in each case the possibilities offered by Europarl.

Annotating discourse connectives by looking at their translation: The translation-spotting technique

The various meanings of discourse connectives like while and however are difficult to identify and annotate, even for trained human annotators. This problem is all the more important that connectives are salient textual markers of cohesion and need to be correctly interpreted for many NLP applications. In this paper, we suggest an alternative route to reach a reliable annotation of connectives, by making use of the information provided by their translation in large parallel corpora. This method thus replaces the difficult explicit reasoning involved in traditional sense annotation by an empirical clustering of the senses emerging from the translations. We argue that this method has the advantage of providing more reliable reference data than traditional sense annotation. In addition, its simplicity allows for the rapid constitution of large annotated datasets.