A filter for syntactically incomparable parallel sentences
Martin Kroon, Sjef Barbiers, Jan Odijk, Stéphanie van der Pas · Linguistics in the Netherlands · 2019
Abstract Massive automatic comparison of languages in parallel corpora will greatly speed up and enhance comparative syntactic research. Automatically extracting and mining syntactic differences from parallel corpora requires a pre-processing step that filters out sentence pairs that cannot be compared syntactically, for example because they involve “free” translations. In this paper we explore four possible filters: the Damerau-Levenshtein distance between POS-tags, the sentence-length ratio, the graph-edit distance between dependency parses, and a combination of the three in a logistic regression model. Results suggest that the dependency-parse filter is the most stable throughout language pairs, while the combination filter achieves the best results.