Deriving Consensus for Multi-Parallel Corpora: an English Bible Study

What can you do with multiple noisy versions of the same text? We present a method which generates a single consensus between multi-parallel corpora. By maximizing a function of linguistic features between word pairs, we jointly learn a single corpus-wide multiway alignment: a consensus between 27 versions of the English Bible. We additionally produce English paraphrases, word-level distributions of tags, and consensus dependency parses. Our method is language independent and applicable to any multi-parallel corpora. Given the Bible’s unique role as alignable bitext for over 800 of the world’s languages, this consensus alignment and resulting resources offer value for multilingual annotation projection, and also shed potential insights into the Bible itself.