TaPaCo: A Corpus of Sentential Paraphrases for 73 Languages

This paper presents TaPaCo, a freely available paraphrase corpus for 73 languages extracted from the Tatoeba database. Tatoeba is a crowdsourcing project mainly geared towards language learners. Its aim is to provide example sentences and translations for particular linguistic constructions and words. The paraphrase corpus is created by populating a graph with Tatoeba sentences and equivalence links between sentences “meaning the same thing”. This graph is then traversed to extract sets of paraphrases. Several language-independent filters and pruning steps are applied to remove uninteresting sentences. A manual evaluation performed on three languages shows that between half and three quarters of inferred paraphrases are correct and that most remaining ones are either correct but trivial, or near-paraphrases that neutralize a morphological distinction. The corpus contains a total of 1.9 million sentences, with 200 - 250 000 sentences per language. It covers a range of languages for which, to our knowledge, no other paraphrase dataset exists. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3707949.