CzechDocs: A Multiway Parallel Dataset of Formatted Documents for Minority Languages in Czechia

2026-06-18

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenges of preserving original document formatting in machine translation and the scarcity of parallel data for minority languages in the Czech Republic. The authors introduce a multilingual, format-rich parallel document corpus encompassing Czech, Ukrainian, and English, supporting HTML, DOCX, and PDF formats. This dataset constitutes the first large-scale, multidirectional parallel resource for regional minority languages that retains rich structural information. By integrating language identification with format parsing techniques, the study enables accurate alignment of real-world multi-format documents and establishes a benchmark by incorporating state-of-the-art format-preserving translation approaches. The publicly released validation set and evaluation toolkit provide a standardized platform for advancing document-level machine translation research and facilitating future shared tasks.

Abstract

We present CzechDocs, a multiway parallel dataset of formatted documents (HTML, DOCX, and PDF) covering Czech and minority languages used in Czechia-primarily Ukrainian and English, with smaller portions of Vietnamese, Russian and other languages. The dataset is designed to support the evaluation of machine translation systems that aim to preserve document formatting during translation. We provide a comparison of the most common approaches to format-preserving machine translation on a validation subset of the dataset. This validation split, together with the evaluation toolkit, is publicly released for further research. A held-out test split will be reserved for a future shared task focused on document-level translation with formatting preservation.

Problem

• format-preserving machine translation
• document-level translation
• parallel dataset
• minority languages
• document formatting

Innovation

• format-preserving machine translation
• multiway parallel dataset
• document-level translation
• minority languages
• evaluation toolkit