# The Mediomatix Corpus: Parallel Data for Romansh Language Varieties via Comparable Schoolbooks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16371 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16371/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03193/) (2021)
- [Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12028/) (2021)
- [WikiMatrix: Mining 135M Parallel Sentences in 1620 Language Pairs from Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05791/) (2019)
- [Facebook FAIR's WMT19 News Translation Task Submission](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06616/) (2019)
- [Domain Robustness in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03109/) (2019)
- [The Effect of Translationese in Machine Translation Test Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08069/) (2019)
- [SwissBERT: The Multilingual Language Model for Switzerland](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13310/) (2023)
- [Does mBERT understand Romansh? Evaluating word embeddings using word alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08702/) (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, 3 of 3)

- [Robust Language Identification for Romansh Varieties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15969/) (2026)
- [Translation Asymmetry in LLMs as a Data Augmentation Factor: A Case Study for 6 Romansh Language Varieties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25489/) (2026)
- [RUMLEM: A Dictionary-Based Lemmatizer for Romansh](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11233/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The five idioms (i.e., varieties) of the Romansh language are largely standardized and are taught in the schools of the respective communities in Switzerland. In this paper, we present the first parallel corpus of Romansh idioms. The corpus is based on 291 schoolbook volumes, which are comparable in content for the five idioms. We use automatic alignment methods to extract 207k multi-parallel segments from the books, with more than 2M tokens in total. A small-scale human evaluation confirms that the segments are highly parallel, making the dataset suitable for NLP applications such as machine translation between Romansh idioms. We release the parallel and unaligned versions of the dataset under a CC-BY-NC-SA license and demonstrate its utility for machine translation by training and evaluating an LLM and a supervised multilingual MT model on the dataset.