A positional linguistics-based system for word alignment

Abstract

This paper describes an algorithm which represents one of the few linguistics-based systems for word-to-word alignment. Most systems are purely statistic and assume some hypotheses about the structure of texts which are often infirmed. Our approach combines statistic methods with positional and linguistic ones in order to can be successfully applied to any kind of bitext as far as the internal structure of the texts is concerned. The linguistic part uses shallow parsing by regular expressions and relies on very general linguistic principles. However a component of language-specific methods can be developed for improving results. Our word-alignment system was evaluated on a Romanian-English bitext. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.