BVS Corpus: A Multilingual Parallel Corpus and Translation Experiments of Biomedical Scientific Texts

The BVS database (Health Virtual Library) is a centralized source of biomedical information for Latin America and Carib, created in 1998 and coordinated by BIREME in agreement with the Pan American Health Organization (OPAS). Abstracts are available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, with a subset in more than one language, thus being a possible source of parallel corpora. In this article, we present the development of parallel corpora from BVS in three languages: English, Portuguese, and Spanish. Sentences were automatically aligned using the Hunalign algorithm for EN/ES and EN/PT language pairs, and for a subset of trilingual articles also. We demonstrate the capabilities of our corpus by training a Neural Machine Translation (OpenNMT) system for each language pair, which outperformed related works on scientific biomedical articles. Sentence alignment was also manually evaluated, presenting an average 96\% of correctly aligned sentences across all languages. Our parallel corpus is freely available, with complementary information regarding article metadata. Copyright (c) 2019 Secretaría de Estado para el Avance Digital

BVS数据库（Health Virtual Library，健康虚拟图书馆）是面向拉丁美洲与加勒比地区的生物医学信息集中式资源库，于1998年创建，由BIREME与泛美卫生组织（Pan American Health Organization，OPAS）合作协调运营。该库收录的摘要支持英语、西班牙语与葡萄牙语三种语言，部分摘要同时拥有多语言版本，因此可作为平行语料库的潜在构建来源。本文基于BVS数据库构建了涵盖英语、葡萄牙语与西班牙语的平行语料库，并详细阐述了其构建流程。针对英西（EN/ES）、英葡（EN/PT）语言对以及部分三语文献，我们采用Hunalign算法完成了句子的自动对齐工作。我们针对每一组语言对训练了基于OpenNMT的神经机器翻译（Neural Machine Translation）系统，经测试，该系统在生物医学科技文献翻译任务上的性能优于现有相关研究。我们还对句子对齐结果开展了人工评估，所有语言组合的平均对齐准确率达96%。本平行语料库可免费获取，并附带文献元数据等补充信息。版权所有©2019 西班牙数字发展国务秘书处（Secretaría de Estado para el Avance Digital）