# 20min-XD: A Comparable Corpus of Swiss News Articles

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21677 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21677/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13663/) (2024)
- [Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10464/) (2018)
- [mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19669/) (2024)
- [SimAlign: High Quality Word Alignments without Parallel Training Data using Static and Contextualized Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08728/) (2020)
- [Pre-training via Paraphrasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15020/) (2020)
- [Understanding Cross-Lingual Alignment -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06228/) (2024)
- [LuxEmbedder: A Cross-Lingual Approach to Enhanced Luxembourgish Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03331/) (2024)
- [Towards Unsupervised Recognition of Token-level Semantic Differences in Related Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13303/) (2023)
- [Fine-tuning the SwissBERT Encoder Model for Embedding Sentences and Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07513/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DocHPLT: A Massively Multilingual Document-Level Translation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13079/) (2025)
- [MOLE: Metadata Extraction and Validation in Scientific Papers Using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19800/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present 20min-XD (20 Minuten cross-lingual document-level), a French-German, document-level comparable corpus of news articles, sourced from the Swiss online news outlet 20 Minuten/20 minutes. Our dataset comprises around 15,000 article pairs spanning 2015 to 2024, automatically aligned based on semantic similarity. We detail the data collection process and alignment methodology. Furthermore, we provide a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the corpus. The resulting dataset exhibits a broad spectrum of cross-lingual similarity, ranging from near-translations to loosely related articles, making it valuable for various NLP applications and broad linguistically motivated studies. We publicly release the dataset in document- and sentence-aligned versions and code for the described experiments.