M a C o C u: Massive collection and curation of monolingual and bilingual data: focus on under-resourced languages (2022)

Abstract: We introduce the project “MaCoCu: Massive collection and curation of monolingual and bilingual data: focus on under-resourced languages”, funded by the Connecting Europe Facility, which is aimed at building monolingual and parallel corpora for under-resourced European languages. The approach followed consists of crawling large amounts of textual data from carefully selected top-level domains of the Internet, and then applying a curation and enrichment pipeline. In addition to corpora, the project will release successive versions of the free/open-source web crawling and curation software used.

## introduction this paper describes the project macocu: massive collection and curation of monolingual and bilingual data: focus on under-resourced languages, funded by the connecting europe facility in the 2020 cef telecom call -automated translation (2020-eu-ia-0078). @xcite this project started on june 1, 2021, and will last for two years. it is aimed at building large and high-quality monolingual and parallel (with english) corpora for five underresourced official eu languages: maltese, bulgarian, slovenian, croatian, and icelandic; 2 and for the languages of the five candidate states to become eu members: turkish, albanian, macedonian, mon-© 2022 the authors. this article is licensed under a creative commons 3.0 licence, no derivative works, attribution, cc-by-nd. 1 https://ec.europa.eu/inea/connecting-eur ope-facility/cef-telecom/2020-eu-ia-0078 2 maltese and icelandic were chosen since they are especially under-resourced official eu languages; bulgarian, slovenian and croatian were chosen due to the interest of the consortium on south-slavic languages, a decision that extends previous efforts in the abu-matran project (toral et al., 2015). tenegrin, and serbian. existing initiatives producing similar corpora, such as paracrawl (bañón et al., 2020) or oscar (abadji et al., 2022) exploit existing resources such as common crawl foot_0 or the internet archive. @xcite in contrast, our strategy consists in automatically crawling top-level domains (tld) with the potential to contain substantial amounts of textual data in the targeted languages, foot_2 and then applying a monolingual and a parallel curation pipelines on the downloaded data. this approach aims at obtaining more and higher-quality data than that available in existing compilations. @xcite one of the objectives of the project is to identify data relevant for digital service infrastructures (dsis). our corpora will be enriched with information about the relevance of the data collected for ten diss: e-health, e-justice, online dispute resolution, europeana, open data portal, business registers interconnection system, e-procurement, safer internet, cybersecurity, and electronic exchange of social security information. ## acknowledgment this action has received funding from the european union's connecting europe facility 2014-2020 -cef telecom, under grant agreement no.