Open Subtitles Paraphrase Corpus for Six Languages

TL;DR

This paper introduces Opusparcus, a multilingual paraphrase corpus derived from movie subtitles, providing large-scale automatically compiled training data and manually verified test sets for six European languages.

Contribution

It presents a new multilingual paraphrase dataset from subtitles, including automatically generated training data and manually verified evaluation sets, facilitating research in paraphrase detection and language learning.

Findings

Corpus covers six European languages.

Contains millions of automatically compiled training pairs.

Includes manually verified evaluation sets.

Abstract

This paper accompanies the release of Opusparcus, a new paraphrase corpus for six European languages: German, English, Finnish, French, Russian, and Swedish. The corpus consists of paraphrases, that is, pairs of sentences in the same language that mean approximately the same thing. The paraphrases are extracted from the OpenSubtitles2016 corpus, which contains subtitles from movies and TV shows. The informal and colloquial genre that occurs in subtitles makes such data a very interesting language resource, for instance, from the perspective of computer assisted language learning. For each target language, the Opusparcus data have been partitioned into three types of data sets: training, development and test sets. The training sets are large, consisting of millions of sentence pairs, and have been compiled automatically, with the help of probabilistic ranking functions. The development and test sets consist of sentence pairs that have been checked manually; each set contains approximately 1000 sentence pairs that have been verified to be acceptable paraphrases by two annotators.