Quantifying the Utility of Parallel Corpora

Martin Franz, J. Scott McCarley, Todd Ward, Wei-Jing Zhu

Abstract: Our English-Chinese cross-language IR system is trained from parallel corpora; we investigate its performance as a function of training corpus size for three different training corpora. We find that the performance of the system as trained on the three parallel corpora can be related by a simple measure, namely the out-of-vocabulary rate of query words.