Automatically Mining Parallel Corpora for Minority Languages from Web Pages

Parallel corpora are indispensable resources for a variety of multilingual natural language processing. This paper describes a system, which mines automatically parallel corpora from web pages. It attempts to overcome the shortage of parallel corpora in minority languages. Learning from the existing technology of mining web bilingual corpora, and combining with the characteristics of minority languages bilingual websites, a method, mining parallel corpora in minority languages based on heuristic information extracted from content, is proposed. Experiments, carried out on the Chinese-Mongolian language pair, show that the system is successful in automatically identifying a significant amount of parallel texts from the World Wide Web.