United nations general assembly resolutions: A six-language parallel corpus

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United Nations General Assembly Resolutions:
A Six-Language Parallel Corpus
Alexandre Rafalovitch1,2
1United Nations
New York
USA
arafalov@gmail.com
Robert Dale2
2Centre for Language Technology
Macquarie University
Sydney, Australia
rdale@science.mq.edu.au
Abstract
In this paper we describe a six-ways paral-
lel public-domain corpus consisting of 2100
United Nations General Assembly Resolu-
tions with translations in the six official lan-
guages of the United Nations, with an av-
erage of around 3 million tokens per lan-
guage. The corpus is available in a pre-
processed, formatting-normalized TMX for-
mat with paragraphs aligned across multiple
languages. We describe the background to the
corpus and its content, the process of its con-
struction, and some of its interesting proper-
ties.
1 Introduction
Parallel corpora are a useful resource for a wide
variety of purposes including the training of ma-
chine translation algorithms (Koehn, 2005), multi-
lingual terminology extraction (Le An Ha and Cor-
pas, 2008) and even bootstrapping algorithms for
languages that do not enjoy the research resources of
English (Yarowsky et al., 2001). Multi-parallel cor-
pora can be more useful than bilingual corpora when
the additional languages may be used to assist text
alignment (Simard, 1999) or as translation bridge
languages, in the sense of (Kumar et al., 2007).
While many European and Germanic languages
already have good parallel research corpus re-
sources, such as JRC-Acquis (Steinberger et al.,
2006) and EuroParl (Koehn, 2005), material in the
Slavic, Sino-Tibetian and Semitic language families
is much rarer. The corpus presented here consists
of a collection of documents containing manually
translated official resolutions of the General Assem-
bly of the United Nations (UN) in the six official lan-
guages of the UN: Arabic, Chinese, English, French,
Russian, and Spanish. Since resolutions are legally
significant, they pass through multiple levels of hu-
man translation and verification, and so the transla-
tions can be expected to be of high quality.
While documents of the United Nations are al-
ready available online via the Official Document
System of the UN1and are mostly in the public do-
main (see (STAI, 1987)), they are not in the most
convenient form for machine processing. The docu-
ments are typically PDF files with reasonably com-
plex typography consisting of two-column text and
extended footnotes, and some are available only as
images without a text layer. The last public research-
ready corpus of UN documents was produced by
the Linguistic Data Consortion (LDC; see (Graff,
1994)) and included English, French and Spanish
only. Given the linguistic variety encompassed by
the UN’s official languages, it is therefore somewhat
disappointing that this material is not easily avail-
able for research in machine translation.
This paper describes some steps towards address-
ing this concern. The corpus described here con-
tains the text of 2100 resolutions for each language
aligned at the level of paragraphs, with just over
74000 paragraphs in each language. The corpus
contains an average of around 3 million tokens for
each language.2The corpus is encoded in XML
1See http://documents.un.org.
2Counting tokens in the Chinese corpus is difficult; not in-
cluding the Chinese data, the average token count across the
other five languages is 3.11 million.

using Translation Memory eXchange format, with
some of the significant sections and text segments
marked to assist future research. TMX format was
selected as a storage format as it is a standard used
in Computer-Assisted Translation tools and has a
structure that, while simple, is nonetheless sufficient
for our needs.3
In this paper, we first provide in Section 2 some
background information on the context in which the
documents in this corpus appear, before going on
to describe the corpus itself and the motivation for
the selection of this subset of UN documents in Sec-
tion 3. Section 4 discusses a number of interesting
properties exhibited by the corpus that may encour-
age specific research directions. Section 5 provides
details regarding access and availability.
2 The UN Document Space
In order to understand the nature of this corpus, it
may be useful to first understand the overall struc-
ture of the United Nations and the range of docu-
ments that the organisation produces.
The United Nations is a large international organ-
isation consisting of six principal organs: the Gen-
eral Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic
and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, the
International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat.
These, together with a number of other agencies,
programmes and bodies (such as UNICEF,UN ITAR
and UN U), form the United Nations family.
Collectively, these bodies generate a massive
quantity of documentation: over the last 15 years,
about 14000 documents have been published each
year, with around half of these being available in all
six languages (these are mostly public documents),
and the other half in some subset of the languages
(these are generally internal documents).
Documents belong to a number of categories:
1. Official resolutions, decisions, statements and
legal instruments: these are the outputs of the
work by the bodies that define the official po-
sitions and provide internal and external guid-
ance. These documents often carry significant
legal weight and are widely published and dis-
tributed.
3We use TMX Version 1.4b: see
http://www.lisa.org.
2. Reports: these are documents reporting work
done; they often serve as inputs for the deliber-
ations of organs, and provide assistance in de-
cision making. A report may also be delivered
by one body or organisational unit to another
as a way of summarising the decisions taken by
the originating unit; for example, the Secretary-
General reports to the General Assembly on the
work of the Secretariat.
3. Records of meetings and discussions: these
may either be verbatim reports or summaries.
4. Letters and notes from the Member States to
the organisations.
5. Internal records such as daily journals, agendas
of work and draft resolutions.
6. Sales publications, such as books and key
reports (e.g., World Economic Situation and
Prospects 2009).
For non-repudiation reasons, changes and additions
to the documents are recorded as separate corrigenda
and addenda documents.
The General Assembly (GA) is the main delib-
erative organ of the United Nations, with a current
membership of 192 Member States. Final delib-
erations of the General Assembly are made in the
plenary sessions, but most of the work is done in
one of the six main committees or many subcom-
mittees, boards, commissions, working groups and
other bodies.4
The official output of the GA is collected together
as Official Records, which consist of resolutions, de-
cisions and key reports. The GA meets in sessions
described as regular,special and emergency special.
Regular sessions start in September and last as long
as required, often right until the start of the next ses-
sion; for example, the 62nd regular session started
on September 18, 2007 and lasted until September
15, 2008. Regular sessions are divided into two
parts: a main session, which lasts until the end of
the year, and a resumed session, which starts in Jan-
uary. Special and emergency special sessions have
more flexibility in the organisation of their work.
4The six main committees of the General Assembly are:
Disarmament and International Security; Economic and Finan-
cial; Social, Humanitarian and Cultural; Special Political and
Decolonization; Administrative and Budgetary; and Legal.

Draft resolutions are introduced into the discus-
sion under agenda items and may be amended,
merged or withdrawn during the course of discus-
sion. Draft resolutions adopted by a committee are
then published in that committee’s report for further
discussion and approval in one of the GA’s plenary
meetings. Resolutions can be adopted at a plenary
meeting by a vote or by an acclamation. The GA
adopts around 300 resolutions in any given session.
While non-binding, resolutions of the General As-
sembly carry legal weight. Final resolutions and de-
cisions of the General Assembly are issued in three
volumes of the Official Records: Volume I contains
resolutions from the main part of the session; vol-
ume II contains decisions from the main part; and
volume III contains both resolutions and decisions
from the resumed part of the session.
3 The Resolutions Corpus
Of the various types of documents present in the
UN document collection, the resolutions are partic-
ularly interesting from a machine translation per-
spective because of their high quality of transla-
tion and strict adherence to editorial conventions;
they also cover an extremely broad range of topics,
whereas other document subsets are more focussed.
We chose, therefore, to begin the construction of an
NLP-friendly UN corpus with the resolutions data.
At around 300 per year, the final resolutions doc-
uments are a relatively small proportion of the to-
tal number of documents produced by the UN, but
the full document count also includes draft resolu-
tions and a large number of other documents that ul-
timately lead to the final resolutions.
The corpus described here consists of the reso-
lutions in Volume I of the regular sessions of the
General Assembly for sessions 55 through 62, cor-
responding to the period 2000–2007. Prior to this
period, and going back to the UN’s first session in
1946, the only electronic versions of the resolutions
available are scans with no text layers.
3.1 The Nature of Resolutions
An example of the initial fragment of a resolution
is shown in Figure 1. A resolution consists of the
following parts:
1. A symbol that identifies the resolution, consist-
Figure 1: Initial fragment of a resolution [English]
ing of a number corresponding to the session,
and a number corresponding to the ordinal po-
sition of this resolution in the series of reso-
lutions adopted in this session; in the present
example, this is 59/34.
2. Information regarding the adoption of the reso-
lution, which may include a list of the Member
States that voted on the resolution.
3. The title of resolution; in the present example
this is Nationality of natural persons in relation
to the succession of States.
4. The name of the organ stating the resolution;
in the corpus described here, this is always The

Figure 2: Initial fragment of a resolution [Russian]
General Assembly.
5. Zero or more preambulatory paragraphs; these
set the context for the rest of the resolution. By
editorial convention, each of these begins with
the present participle form of a verb or verb
phrase in italics.
6. One or more operative paragraphs that make
up the essence of the resolution: generally
speaking, these are the actions the GA wants to
see take place. Each is introduced by a present
tense verb or verb phrase in italics; the specific
choice of verb has some significance. By edi-
torial convention, the operative paragraphs are
numbered when there is more than one.
For comparison, the Russian translation of the initial
part of this resolution is shown in Figure 2.
Resolutions have an unconventional syntactic and
orthographic structure. In each language, from the
name of the organ onwards, the resolution takes the
form of a single, extended sentence, where the sen-
tence is broken into a series of distinct paragraphs.
Each orthographic paragraph is therefore really what
we would normally think of as a complex clause.
These characteristics, and a number of other typo-
graphic features, are dictated by the resolution edit-
ing conventions (United Nations, 1983).
Language # tokens # characters (M)
English 3067550 20.7
French 3442254 22.8
Spanish 3581566 22.9
Russian 2748898 22.0
Chinese – 5.7
Arabic 2721463 17.2
Table 1: Corpus statistics for the six languages. Token
count for the Chinese data is omitted because of the dif-
ficulty in providing a reliable or meaningful number for
comparison purposes.
While simple resolutions contain only the ele-
ments listed above, more complex resolutions can
contain additional sections, often with their own ti-
tles and/or preambles. Furthermore, some resolu-
tions contain annexes and embedded texts that may
not follow the editorial conventions; and tables may
also appear.5
3.2 The Content of the Corpus
For each language, the corpus contains just over
74000 paragraphs of text, and, for English, around
3 million tokens. Table 1 provides statistics on the
data for the six languages; Figure 3 shows the 20
most common tokens that appear in five of the lan-
guages. The most frequent words in this corpus are
consistent with those found in other corpora, with
the unsurprising exception of the appearance of the
terms United and Nations and a few other domain
specific elements.
Within the UN’s own document processing en-
vironment, the resolutions that make up Volume I
are grouped together in seven large Microsoft Word
files: six of these contain resolutions that came
through one of the six main committees, and the sev-
enth contains those that were introduced directly to
the plenary meeting.
3.3 Building the Corpus
We extracted the individual resolutions from these
files and converted them into basic HTML format
5These items are relatively rare. In the 2100-resolution cor-
pus described here, 41 (1.95%) contain tables and 71 (3.38%)
contain annexes; 27 (1.29%) of these contain both.

Figure 3: The 20 most frequent tokens in five of the languages
using Word’s HTML export capability. The HTML
output was then run through a cleanup process that
would allow only basic paragraph marking and ty-
pographic markup (normally italics) at the start of
preambulatory and operative paragraphs, indicating
lead-in phrases. Additionally, some normalization
was performed to account for the fact that format-
ting that looks continuous within MS Word may ac-
tually consist of multiple formatting segments on the
HTML code level; for example, a contiguous se-
quence of italicised words may appear in the source
as a sequence of distinct italicisation events. Incon-
sistencies with the use of quotes and non-breaking
spaces were also normalized. Finally, tables were
stripped from the text as they mostly contain num-
bers and form nested paragraph structures, which are
difficult to represent in TMX form.
From the HTML format, the multiple language
versions for the same resolution symbol (the identifi-
cation numbers introduced earlier) were aligned, us-
ing the assumption that the translations were strict at
the level of formatting as well as at the level of con-
tent. In a small number of cases, the Word format-
ting caused problems (typically the introduction of
spurious paragraph breaks); these were fixed man-
ually. The aligned resolution texts were then con-
verted into TMX format, while at the same time
marking the adoption information section, incorpo-
rating and marking footnotes, and converting lead-in
phrase marking into standard TMX markup. An ex-
ample is provided in Figure 4.6
Given the availability of a number of existing to-
kenisers that users might wish to apply to the texts
for different purposes, we have not carried out a
complete tokenization of the corpus. However, we
have marked document symbols, since these tokens
might be problematic for standard tokenisers.
4 Interesting Properties of the Corpus
4.1 Document Symbols
Because of their importance, it is essential that the
scope for misinterpretation of resolutions be min-
imised. To this end, these documents generally
contain all relevant context and make heavy use of
fully-explicit and unambiguous document symbol
6Note that the Arabic token ordering displays incorrectly
here as a consequence of the XML labels.

Figure 4: A six-way aligned resolution paragraph.

Document Description Symbol Used
A document from the 62nd session of the General Assembly A/62/100
A resolution from the 52nd session of the General Assembly 52/215 A to D
A Security Council resolution adopted in the year 2000 1325 (2000)
Second addendum to the document of the Commission on Human Rights
(CN.4) of the Economic and Social Council
E/CN.4/1998/53/Add.2
A document with a dual symbol, one from the General Assembly and one from
the Security Council
A/50/60-S/1995/1
A resolution from the 50th session of the International Atomic Energy Agency GC(50)/RES/16
Table 2: Document symbols
references. Similar to complex symbols in the bi-
ological domain (Proux et al., 1998), these symbols
may include slashes, dashes, full stops, brackets and
spaces. Some examples are shown in Table 2.
While it is not practical to identify all possible
symbol variations,7we have developed a set of regu-
lar expressions to locate and mark a significant pro-
portion of the symbols in the corpus.
4.2 Lead-in Phrases
As noted above, preambulatory and operative para-
graphs begin with specially-marked lead-in phrases
based on verbs whose meaning carries some signifi-
cance. While there are no official guidelines on what
constitutes an acceptable phrase, the requirements of
reliable translation tend to limit the chosen words
and phrase forms to a number of popular choices
used in the majority of the cases. Table 3 shows the
ten most frequent lead-in phrases across three of the
six languages.
4.3 Named Entity Mentions
United Nations documentation in general, and the
resolutions of the General Assembly in particular,
include a large number of complex named entity
mentions referring to a broad variety of entity types.
Here are some examples, separated by semi-colons:
Bodies: United Nations; International Atomic En-
ergy Agency; United Nations Educational, Sci-
entific and Cultural Organization.
7(Griffiths, 2005) presents an analysis of 14000 symbols as-
signed in one year, and identifies a number of flaws that include
inconsistent application of editorial conventions.
Organisational units: General Assembly; Eco-
nomic and Social Council; the Advisory Com-
mittee on the United Nations Programme of
Assistance in the Teaching, Study, Dissemina-
tion and Wider Appreciation of International
Law; Open-ended Ad Hoc Working Group on
the Causes of Conflict and the Promotion of
Durable Peace and Sustainable Development in
Africa.
Agents: Secretary-General; United Nations Special
Representative for Children and Armed Con-
flict; the Special Rapporteur of the Commission
on Human Rights.
As can be seen from these examples, named entity
mentions can be very long and may contain tokens,
such as commas, that are normally treated as delim-
iters.
5 Corpus Availability
The corpus described here is available from
http://www.uncorpora.org as a 49.4Mb zip
file that contains just over 74000 pre-processed,
formatting-normalised aligned paragraphs in Trans-
lation Memory eXchange (TMX) 1.4b format. As
noted earlier, special markup is included for docu-
ment symbols and the lead-in phrases in preambu-
latory and operative paragraphs; footnote content is
also marked. Tables have been removed. The voting
information is also marked specially, as it contains
country lists in alphabetic order, and may not partic-
ularly useful for alignment purposes.
Basic utilities are provided to manipulate, extract,
or delete specially tagged areas as well as to extract
specific languages from the six-language set.

Rank English French Spanish
1 3707 Requests 3509 Prie 3905 Pide
2 3325 Recalling 3383 Rappelant 3323 Recordando
3 2177 Calls upon 1973 Demande 1877 Exhorta
4 1927 Welcomes 1870 D ´
ecide 1871 Insta
5 1797 Decides 1738 Souligne 1796 Decide
6 1688 Urges 1660 Invite 1587 Alienta
7 1604 Encourages 1446 R´
eaffirme 1502 Reconociendo
8 1402 Invites 1407 R´
eaffirmant 1396 Invita
9 1350 Recognizing 1361 Se f´
elicite 1291 Reafirmando
10 1269 Reaffirming 1273 Encourage 1257 Reafirma
Table 3: The 10 most frequent lead-in phrases in the three languages
6 Conclusions
In this paper we have described a unique six-
language parallel corpus consisting of 2100 UN res-
olutions, multiply-aligned and marked-up for a num-
ber of constituent phenomena. The variety of lan-
guage families present is particulary of interest for
work based on the use of bridge languages (Kumar
et al., 2007).
We see this as the first step in the construction of
a constantly growing corpus of aligned documents
harvested from the UN’s document collection. We
encourage wide use of the corpus; our sponsors will
be likely to support further extension if there is a
perceived value in its availability.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Department for Gen-
eral Assembly and Conference Management of the
United Nations Secretariat for providing access to
the source documents.
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