# CCAligned: A Massive Collection of Cross-Lingual Web-Document Pairs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.06154 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06154/

## Key facts

- Cited by 136 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 136)

- [The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03193/) (2021)
- [Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08758/) (2021)
- [Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12028/) (2021)
- [Tower: An Open Multilingual Large Language Model for Translation-Related Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17733/) (2024)
- [DeepNet: Scaling Transformers to 1,000 Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00555/) (2022)
- [MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11811/) (2021)
- [Towards a Cleaner Document-Oriented Multilingual Crawled Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06642/) (2022)
- [Samanantar: The Largest Publicly Available Parallel Corpora Collection for 11 Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05596/) (2021)
- [AMMUS : A Survey of Transformer-based Pretrained Models in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05542/) (2021)
- [The Multilingual TEDx Corpus for Speech Recognition and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01757/) (2021)
- [A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02022/) (2022)
- [XLM-E: Cross-lingual Language Model Pre-training via ELECTRA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.16138/) (2021)
- [Reuse, Don't Retrain: A Recipe for Continued Pretraining of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07263/) (2024)
- [Building Machine Translation Systems for the Next Thousand Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03983/) (2022)
- [LLMs Are Few-Shot In-Context Low-Resource Language Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16512/) (2024)
- [Tokenization and the Noiseless Channel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16842/) (2023)
- [Facebook AI WMT21 News Translation Task Submission](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03265/) (2021)
- [PanGu-Sigma: Towards Trillion Parameter Language Model with Sparse Heterogeneous Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10845/) (2023)
- [Eliciting the Translation Ability of Large Language Models via Multilingual Finetuning with Translation Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15083/) (2023)
- [Data Scaling Laws in NMT: The Effect of Noise and Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01994/) (2022)
- [AfroLID: A Neural Language Identification Tool for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11744/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Cross-Lingual Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12515/) (2022)
- [Multilingual Machine Translation with Open Large Language Models at Practical Scale: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02481/) (2025)
- [A Formal Perspective on Byte-Pair Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16837/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Machine Translation Systems from Microsoft for WMT21 Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02086/) (2021)
- [Frustratingly Easy Label Projection for Cross-lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15613/) (2022)
- [The ROOTS Search Tool: Data Transparency for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14035/) (2023)
- [Z-Code++: A Pre-trained Language Model Optimized for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09770/) (2022)
- [Code-Switching Curriculum Learning for Multilingual Transfer in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02460/) (2024)
- [Pre-Trained Multilingual Sequence-to-Sequence Models: A Hope for Low-Resource Language Translation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08850/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-lingual document alignment aims to identify pairs of documents in two distinct languages that are of comparable content or translations of each other. In this paper, we exploit the signals embedded in URLs to label web documents at scale with an average precision of 94.5% across different language pairs. We mine sixty-eight snapshots of the Common Crawl corpus and identify web document pairs that are translations of each other. We release a new web dataset consisting of over 392 million URL pairs from Common Crawl covering documents in 8144 language pairs of which 137 pairs include English. In addition to curating this massive dataset, we introduce baseline methods that leverage cross-lingual representations to identify aligned documents based on their textual content. Finally, we demonstrate the value of this parallel documents dataset through a downstream task of mining parallel sentences and measuring the quality of machine translations from models trained on this mined data. Our objective in releasing this dataset is to foster new research in cross-lingual NLP across a variety of low, medium, and high-resource languages.
