Automatic Identification of Document Translations in Large Multilingual Document Collections

Texts and their translations are a rich linguistic resource that can be used to train and test statistics-based Machine Translation systems and many other applications. In this paper, we present a working system that can identify translations and other very similar documents among a large number of candidates, by representing the document contents with a vector of thesaurus terms from a multilingual thesaurus, and by then measuring the semantic similarity between the vectors. Tests on different text types have shown that the system can detect translations with over 96% precision in a large search space of 820 documents or more. The system was tuned to ignore language-specific similarities and to give similar documents in a second language the same similarity score as equivalent documents in the same language. The application can also be used to detect cross-lingual document plagiarism.