Suite of tools supports managing and exploring aligned multilingual texts
ParaTaxe: a Suite of Tools for Processing and Publishing Multi-parallel Corpora
Computation and Language
Summary
It is hard to keep collections of linked texts in many languages available online because of limited maintenance and funding. The authors created a set of open-source tools to help process, align, and view these multilingual text collections. Their tools include a smart aligner that uses language understanding models, a processing pipeline, and web interfaces for managing and exploring the aligned texts. This approach aims to make parallel text corpora easier to maintain and access over time.
What this means in practice
- •For digital humanities teams: Manage and publish collections of comparable texts in multiple languages using integrated processing and web display tools.
- •For language technology developers: Integrate a multilingual embedding-based aligner to improve automated text alignment accuracy within language processing workflows.
Authors
Olivier Kraif, Cyrille François, Elnaz Jalilian, Natacha Rimasson-Fertin, Pascale Roux
Abstract
Over the past fifteen years, digital tools for parallelizing and aligning textual corpora have developed significantly within the field of digital humanities. Several projects and software tools have been created to compare different translations or versions of texts. Despite these technical advances, many parallel corpora produced in academic contexts quickly become inaccessible online due to the lack of maintenance or funding. To address this gap, we present a suite of open-source tools developed within the ACR Grimm Tradalign and ParaTaxe projects. This suite includes the AIlign aligner, based on multilingual embeddings, a Python processing pipeline for converting and aligning corpora, a web interface called ParaTaxe for managing collections of parallel corpora, and a web interface for exploring aligned corpora built with TEI-Publisher.