Expanding the European Parliament Translation and Interpreting Corpus: A Modular Pipeline for the Construction of Complex Corpora

The present paper introduces an expanded version of the European Parliament Translation and Interpreting Corpus (EPTIC), a multimodal parallel corpus comprising speeches delivered at the European Parliament along with their official interpretations and translations (see Bernardini et al., 2016; Bernardini et al., 2018). Constructing multimodal and parallel corpora for translation and interpreting studies (TIS) has been acknowledged as a “formidable task” (Bernardini et al., 2018), which – if automated, as we propose – involves a number of subtasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), multilingual sentence alignment, and forced alignment, each of which poses its own challenges. Yet tackling these subtasks also offers a unique way to evaluate state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) tools against a unique, multilingual benchmark. In this paper we discuss the development of a modular pipeline adaptable for each of these subtasks and address the broader implications of this work for the field of corpus construction.

In 14th Conference on Language Technologies and Digital Humanities (JTDH)