TaPaCo: A Corpus of Sentential Paraphrases for 73 Languages

Yves Scherrer


Abstract
This paper presents TaPaCo, a freely available paraphrase corpus for 73 languages extracted from the Tatoeba database. Tatoeba is a crowdsourcing project mainly geared towards language learners. Its aim is to provide example sentences and translations for particular linguistic constructions and words. The paraphrase corpus is created by populating a graph with Tatoeba sentences and equivalence links between sentences “meaning the same thing”. This graph is then traversed to extract sets of paraphrases. Several language-independent filters and pruning steps are applied to remove uninteresting sentences. A manual evaluation performed on three languages shows that between half and three quarters of inferred paraphrases are correct and that most remaining ones are either correct but trivial, or near-paraphrases that neutralize a morphological distinction. The corpus contains a total of 1.9 million sentences, with 200 - 250 000 sentences per language. It covers a range of languages for which, to our knowledge, no other paraphrase dataset exists. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3707949.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.848
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6868–6873
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.848
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yves Scherrer. 2020. TaPaCo: A Corpus of Sentential Paraphrases for 73 Languages. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6868–6873, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
TaPaCo: A Corpus of Sentential Paraphrases for 73 Languages (Scherrer, LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.848.pdf
Data
TaPaCo