Massively Multilingual Document Alignment with Cross-lingual Sentence-Mover's Distance

Abstract

Cross-lingual document alignment aims to identify pairs of documents in two distinct languages that are of comparable content or translations of each other. Such aligned data can be used for a variety of NLP tasks from training cross-lingual representations to mining parallel bitexts for machine translation training. In this paper we develop an unsupervised scoring function that leverages cross-lingual sentence embeddings to compute the semantic distance between documents in different languages. These semantic distances are then used to guide a document alignment algorithm to properly pair cross-lingual web documents across a variety of low, mid, and high-resource language pairs. Recognizing that our proposed scoring function and other state of the art methods are computationally intractable for long web documents, we utilize a more tractable greedy algorithm that performs comparably. We experimentally demonstrate that our distance metric performs better alignment than current baselines outperforming them by 7% on high-resource language pairs, 15% on mid-resource language pairs, and 22% on low-resource language pairs.