EVBCorpus - A Multi-Layer English-Vietnamese Bilingual Corpus for Studying Tasks in Comparative Linguistics

Bilingual corpora play an important role as resources not only for machine translation research and development but also for studying tasks in comparative linguistics. Manual annotation of word alignments is of significance to provide a gold-standard for developing and evaluating machine translation models and comparative linguistics tasks. This paper presents research on building an English-Vietnamese parallel corpus, which is constructed for building a Vietnamese-English machine translation system. We describe the specification of collecting data for the corpus, linguistic tagging, bilingual annotation, and the tools specially developed for the manual annotation. An English-Vietnamese bilingual corpus of over 800,000 sentence pairs and 10,000,000 English words as well as Vietnamese words has been collected and aligned at the sentence level, and over 45,000 sentence pairs of this corpus have been aligned at the word level. Moreover, the 45,000 sentence pairs have been tagged using other linguistics tags, including word segmentation for Vietnamese text, chunker and named entity tags.