Quality Beyond A Glance: Revealing Large Quality Differences Between Web-Crawled Parallel Corpora

Parallel corpora play a vital role in advanced multilingual natural language processing tasks, notably in machine translation (MT). The recent emergence of numerous large parallel corpora, often extracted from multilingual documents on the Internet, has expanded the available resources. Nevertheless, the quality of these corpora remains largely unexplored, while there are large differences in how the corpora are constructed. Moreover, how the potential differences affect the performance of neural MT (NMT) systems has also received limited attention. This study addresses this gap by manually and automatically evaluating four well-known publicly available parallel corpora across eleven language pairs. Our findings are quite concerning: all corpora contain a substantial amount of noisy sentence pairs, with CCMatrix and CCAligned having well below of 50% reasonably clean pairs. MaCoCu and ParaCrawl generally have higher quality texts, though around a third of the texts still have clear issues. While corpus size impacts NMT models’ performance, our study highlights the critical role of quality: higher-quality corpora consistently yield better-performing NMT models when controlling for size.