Using syntactic dependencies for word alignment

Abstract

We attack the problem of aligning words from pairs of bilingual sentences, rather than the well-known, and somewhat easier, problem of aligning sentences. The method that we develop is based on the use of bilingual dictionaries, having supposed that lemmatization has taken place. We first show that this method performs poorly in terms of silence and noise. To improve its performance we introduce syntactic dependency relations between the words in each of the two sentences considered. In this sense the syntagmatic level comes to the rescue of the paradigmatic level at which the alignment actually takes place.