Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora
Résumé
In the language engineering and the linguistics communities, research on comparable corpora has been
motivated by two main reasons. In language engineering, on the one hand, it is primarily motivated
by the need to use comparable corpora as training data for statistical Natural Language Processing
applications such as statistical machine translation or cross-lingual retrieval. In linguistics, on the other
hand, comparable corpora are of interest in themselves by making possible inter-linguistic discoveries
and comparisons. It is generally accepted in both communities that comparable corpora are documents
in one or several languages that are comparable in content and form in various degrees and dimensions.
We believe that the linguistic definitions and observations related to comparable corpora can improve
methods to mine such corpora for applications of statistical NLP. As such, it is of great interest to bring
together builders and users of such corpora.
Comparable corpora are collections of documents that are comparable in content and form in various
degrees and dimensions. This definition includes many types of parallel and non-parallel multilingual
corpora, but also sets of monolingual corpora that are used for comparative purposes. Research on
comparable corpora is active but used to be scattered among many workshops and conferences. The
workshop series on “Building and Using Comparable Corpora” (BUCC) aims at promoting progress in
this exciting emerging field by bundling its research, thereby making it more visible and giving it a better
platform.
Following the twelve previous editions of the workshop which took place in Africa (LREC’08 in
Marrakech), America (ACL’11 in Portland and ACL’17 in Vancouver), Asia (ACL-IJCNLP’09 in
Singapore, ACL-IJCNLP’15 in Beijing, LREC’18 in Miyazaki, Japan), Europe (LREC’10 in Malta,
ACL’13 in Sofia, LREC’14 in Reykjavik, LREC’16 in Portoroz, RANLP’19 in Varna) and also on
the border between Asia and Europe (LREC’12 in Istanbul), this year the 13th edition of the BUCC
workshop was supposed to be held in Marseille.
However, due to the corona crisis, unfortunately LREC 2020 could not be held in Marseille this year.
Therefore, with full support of the LREC organizers, we decided to hold the BUCC workshop as a free
online event on the planned date. This not only causes problems, but also offers chances which we are
eager to explore. Fortunately, the fourth BUCC shared task on "Bilingual Dictionary Induction from
Comparable Corpora" was not strongly affected by this change and could be successfully conducted
with surprisingly good results. Several papers by the shared task participants in this volume as well as
an overview paper provide more information on this.
We would like to thank all people who in one way or another helped in making this workshop once again
a success. We are especially grateful to Khalid Choukri for his excellent and almost magical guidance
concerning the proceedings, to Nicoletta Calzolari for her continuous support of our workshop, and to
Hélène Mazo, Sara Goggi and the whole team of LREC organisers for finding solutions to all matters of
concern.
Our special thanks go to Holger Schwenk and Jörg Tiedemann for accepting to give invited presentations
and to the members of the programme committee who did an excellent job in reviewing the submitted
papers under strict time constraints. Last but not least we would like to thank our authors, shared task
teams and all participants of the workshop.