A Program for Aligning Sentences in Bilingual Corpora

A Program for Aligning Sentences in Bilingual Corpora (1991)

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by William Gale Kenneth , Kenneth W. Church

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Computational Linguistics

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Datum	Value	Source
TITLE	A Program for Aligning Sentences in Bilingual Corpora	user correction - Legacy Corrections
AUTHOR NAME	William Gale Kenneth	user correction - Legacy Corrections
AUTHOR AFFIL	AT&T Bell Laboratories	user correction - Legacy Corrections
AUTHOR NAME	Kenneth W. Church	user correction - Legacy Corrections
AUTHOR AFFIL	AT&T Bell Laboratories	user correction - Legacy Corrections
ABSTRACT	This paper will describe a method and a program (align) for aligning sentences based on a simple statistical model of character lengths. The program uses the fact that longer sentences in one language tend to be translated into longer sentences in the other language, and that shorter sentences tend to be translated into shorter sentences. A probabilistic score is assigned to each proposed correspondence of sen tences, based on the scaled difference of lengths of the two sentences (in characters) and the variance of this difference. This probabilistic score is used in a dynamic programming framework to find the maximum likelihood alignment of sentences. It is remarkable that such a simple approach works as well as it does. An evaluation was performed based on a trilingual corpus of economic reports issued by the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) in English, French, and German. The method correctly aligned all but 4% of the sentences. Moreover, it is possible to extract a large subcorpus that has a much smaller error rate. By selecting the best-scoring 80% of the alignments, the error rate is reduced from 4% to 0.7%. There were more errors on the English-French subcorpus than on the English-German subcorpus, showing that error rates will depend on the corpus considered; however, both were small enough to hope that the method will be useful for many language pairs. To further research on bilingual corpora, a much larger sample of Canadian Hansards (approximately 90 million words, half in English and and half in French) has been aligned with the align program and will be available through the Data Collection Initiative of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL/DCI). In addition, in order to facilitate replication of the align program, an appendix is provided with ...	user correction - Legacy Corrections
YEAR	1991	INFERENCE
VENUE	Computational Linguistics	INFERENCE
VENUE TYPE	CONFERENCE	INFERENCE
PAGES	177--184	INFERENCE
VOLUME	19	INFERENCE
CITATIONS	10 found	ParsCit 1.0