Malaterre – Topic-Modeling of Multilingual Non-Parallel Corpora – DS² 2021
Channel: CEFISES at UCLouvain
Date: 2021-03-17

The talk “Topic-modeling of multilingual non-parallel corpora: Applying machine-translation to a philosophy of science corpus” by Christophe Malaterre (Université du Québec à Montréal), recorded at the DS² 2021 online conference, March 16, 2021.


Topic modelling is a well-proven tool to investigate the semantic content of textual corpora. Yet corpora sometimes include texts in several languages, making it impossible to apply language-specific computational approaches over their entire content. This is the problem we encountered when setting to analyze a philosophy of science corpus spanning over 8 decades and including original articles in Dutch, German and French, on top of a large majority of articles in English. To circumvent this multilingual problem, we propose to use machine-translation tools to bulk translate non-English documents into English. Though largely imperfect, especially syntactically, these translations should nevertheless provide correctly translated terms and preserve the semantic proximity of documents with respect to one another. To assess the reliability of this translation step, we develop a “semantic topology preservation test” that relies on estimating the extent to which document-to-document distances have been preserved during translation. We then conduct an LDA topic-model analysis over the entire corpus of translated and English original texts, and compare it to a topic-model done over the English original texts only. We thereby identify the specific contribution of the translated texts. These studies reveal a more complete picture of main topics that can found in the philosophy of science literature, especially during the earlier periods of the discipline during which numerous articles were published in languages other than English.

Prof. Malaterre is Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of the Life Sciences and Professeur in the Département de philosophie at the Université du Québec à Montréal.