The Scielo Corpus: a Parallel Corpus of Scientific Publications for Biomedicine

Mariana Neves, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Aurélie Névéol


Abstract
The biomedical scientific literature is a rich source of information not only in the English language, for which it is more abundant, but also in other languages, such as Portuguese, Spanish and French. We present the first freely available parallel corpus of scientific publications for the biomedical domain. Documents from the ”Biological Sciences” and ”Health Sciences” categories were retrieved from the Scielo database and parallel titles and abstracts are available for the following language pairs: Portuguese/English (about 86,000 documents in total), Spanish/English (about 95,000 documents) and French/English (about 2,000 documents). Additionally, monolingual data was also collected for all four languages. Sentences in the parallel corpus were automatically aligned and a manual analysis of 200 documents by native experts found that a minimum of 79% of sentences were correctly aligned in all language pairs. We demonstrate the utility of the corpus by running baseline machine translation experiments. We show that for all language pairs, a statistical machine translation system trained on the parallel corpora achieves performance that rivals or exceeds the state of the art in the biomedical domain. Furthermore, the corpora are currently being used in the biomedical task in the First Conference on Machine Translation (WMT’16).
Anthology ID:
L16-1470
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2942–2948
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1470
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mariana Neves, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, and Aurélie Névéol. 2016. The Scielo Corpus: a Parallel Corpus of Scientific Publications for Biomedicine. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 2942–2948, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
The Scielo Corpus: a Parallel Corpus of Scientific Publications for Biomedicine (Neves et al., LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1470.pdf