Cleaning the Europarl Corpus for Linguistic Applications

We discovered several recurring errors in the current version of the Europarl Corpus originating both from theweb site of the European Parliament and the corpus compilation based thereon. The most frequent error was incompletely extracted metadata leaving non-textual fragments within the textual parts of the corpus files. This is, on average, the case for every second speaker change. We not only cleaned the Europarl Corpus by correcting several kinds of errors, but also aligned the speakers’ contributions of all available languages and compiled everything into a new XML-structured corpus. This facilitates a more sophisticated selection of data, e.g. querying the corpus for speeches by speakers of a particular political group or in particular language combinations.