Co-clustering of bilingual datasets as a mean for assisting the construction of thematic bilingual comparable corpora

We address in this paper the assisted construction of bilingual thematic comparable corpora by means of co-clustering bilingual documents collected from raw sources such as the Web. The proposed approach is based on a quantitative comparability measure and a co-clustering approach which allow to mix similarity measures existing in each of the two linguistic spaces with a ”thematic” comparability measure that defines a mapping between these two spaces. With the improvement of the co-clustering (k-medoids) performance we get, we use a comparability threshold and a manual verification to ensure the good and robust alignment of co-clusters (co-medoids). Finally, from any available raw corpus, we enrich the aligned clusters in order to provide ”thematic” comparable corpora of good quality and controlled size. On a case study that exploit raw web data, we show that this approach scales reasonably well and is quite suited for the construction of thematic comparable corpora of good quality.