  We present a new, unique and freely available parallel corpus containing
European Union (EU) documents of mostly legal nature. It is available in all 20
official EUanguages, with additional documents being available in the languages
of the EU candidate countries. The corpus consists of almost 8,000 documents
per language, with an average size of nearly 9 million words per language.
Pair-wise paragraph alignment information produced by two different aligners
(Vanilla and HunAlign) is available for all 190+ language pair combinations.
Most texts have been manually classified according to the EUROVOC subject
domains so that the collection can also be used to train and test multi-label
classification algorithms and keyword-assignment software. The corpus is
encoded in XML, according to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines. Due to
the large number of parallel texts in many languages, the JRC-Acquis is
particularly suitable to carry out all types of cross-language research, as
well as to test and benchmark text analysis software across different languages
(for instance for alignment, sentence splitting and term extraction).
