6. A method of generating parallel, bi-lingual corpora, comprising: executing a query over a wide area network to identify a set of candidate web pages in a first language from multiple data sources; executing a hierarchical set of content-based processing steps, in a predetermined order, on a selected candidate web page from the set of candidate web pages to identify a possibly parallel web page in a second language that is possibly parallel to the selected candidate web page in the first language, wherein executing a hierarchical set of content-based processing steps to identify a possibly parallel web page comprises: determining whether the selected candidate web page, itself, includes parallel, bi-lingual texts by identifying text in the second language within the selected candidate web page and by comparing the identified text in the second language to text in the first language within the candidate web page to identify parallel, bi-lingual texts, and if not, following hyperlinks in the selected candidate web page to linked web pages and determining whether the linked web pages include text in the second language and to compare text in the second language in the linked web pages to text in the first language within the selected candidate web page to identify a possibly parallel web page; performing parallelism verification to verify that the bi-lingual texts within the candidate web page, or the candidate web page and the possibly parallel web page, are sufficiently parallel texts related to the query; if so, outputting an indication that the candidate web page and the possibly parallel web page are parallel, bi-lingual texts, along with textual alignments of the parallel, bi-lingual texts; and repeating the steps of executing a query, executing a hierarchical set of content-based processing steps, performing parallelism verification and outputting, to obtain at least one parallel, bi-lingual corpus that includes a first plurality of web-pages in the first language as well a second plurality of web pages in the second language that are translated versions of the first plurality of web pages.
9. The method of claim 6 wherein the hierarchical set of content-based processing steps comprise: translating named entities in the selected candidate web page into the target language; executing a named entity query over the wide area network based on the translated named entities; and determining whether web pages returned based on the named entity query are parallel to the selected candidate web page.