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Aligning sentences in bilingual corpora using lexical information

Author:

Stanley F. ChenAuthors Info & Claims

ACL '93: Proceedings of the 31st annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics

Pages 9 - 16

https://doi.org/10.3115/981574.981576

Published: 22 June 1993 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a fast algorithm for aligning sentences with their translations in a bilingual corpus. Existing efficient algorithms ignore word identities and only consider sentence length (Brown et al., 1991b; Gale and Church, 1991). Our algorithm constructs a simple statistical word-to-word translation model on the fly during alignment. We find the alignment that maximizes the probability of generating the corpus with this translation model. We have achieved an error rate of approximately 0.4% on Canadian Hansard data, which is a significant improvement over previous results. The algorithm is language independent.

References

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(Bellman, 1957) Richard Bellman. Dynamic Programming. Princeton University Press, Princeton N.J., 1957.

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(Brown et al., 1990) Peter F. Brown, John Cocke, Stephen A. DellaPietra, Vincent J. DellaPietra, Frederick Jelinek, John D. Lafferty, Robert L. Mercer, and Paul S. Roossin. A statistical approach to machine translation. Computational Linguistics, 16(2):79--85, June 1990.

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(Brown et al., 1991a) Peter F. Brown, Stephen A. DellaPietra, Vincent J. DellaPietra, and Robert L. Mercer. Word sense disambiguation using statistical methods. In Proceedings 29th Annual Meeting of the ACL, pages 265--270, Berkeley, CA, June 1991.

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(Brown et al., 1991b) Peter F. Brown, Jennifer C. Lai, and Robert L. Mercer. Aligning sentences in parallel corpora. In Proceedings 29th Annual Meeting of the ACL, pages 169--176, Berkeley, CA, June 1991.

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(Brown et al., 1993) Peter F. Brown, Stephen A. DellaPietra, Vincent J. DellaPietra, and Robert L. Mercer. The mathematics of machine translation: Parameter estimation. Computational Linguistics, 1993. To appear.

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(Catizone et al., 1989) Roberta Catizone, Graham Russell, and Susan Warwick. Deriving translation data from bilingual texts. In Proceedings of the First International Acquisition Workshop, Detroit, Michigan, August 1989.

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(Chen, 1993) Stanley F. Chen. Aligning sentences in bilingual corpora using lexical information. Technical Report TR-12-93, Harvard University, 1993.

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(Dagan et al., 1991) Ido Dagan, Alon Itai, and Ulrike Schwall. Two languages are more informative than one. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the ACL, pages 130--137, 1991.

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(Gale and Church, 1991) William A. Gale and Kenneth W. Church. A program for aligning sentences in bilingual corpora. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the ACL, Berkeley, California, June 1991.

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(Gale et al., 1992) William A. Gale, Kenneth W. Church, and David Yarowsky. Using bilingual materials to develop word sense disambiguation methods. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation, pages 101--112, Montréal, Canada, June 1992.

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(Kay, 1991) Martin Kay. Text-translation alignment. In ACH/ALLC '91: "Making Connections" Conference Handbook, Tempe, Arizona, March 1991.

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Cited By

Kim HTosho HMoon SOkazaki NKomachi M(2023)North Korean Neural Machine Translation through South Korean ResourcesACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing10.1145/360894722:9(1-22)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3608947
He SLiu KAn W(2019)Learning to align question and answer utterances in customer service conversation with recurrent pointer networksProceedings of the Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Thirty-First Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference and Ninth AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence10.1609/aaai.v33i01.3301134(134-141)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1609/aaai.v33i01.3301134
Trieu HTran DIttoo ANguyen L(2019)Leveraging Additional Resources for Improving Statistical Machine Translation on Asian Low-Resource LanguagesACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing10.1145/331493618:3(1-22)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3314936
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Aligning sentences in bilingual corpora using lexical information
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ACL '93: Proceedings of the 31st annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics

June 1993

320 pages

Program Chair:
Lenhart Schubert
University of Rochester

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Association for Computational Linguistics

United States

Publication History

Published: 22 June 1993

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Cited By

Kim HTosho HMoon SOkazaki NKomachi M(2023)North Korean Neural Machine Translation through South Korean ResourcesACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing10.1145/360894722:9(1-22)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3608947
He SLiu KAn W(2019)Learning to align question and answer utterances in customer service conversation with recurrent pointer networksProceedings of the Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Thirty-First Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference and Ninth AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence10.1609/aaai.v33i01.3301134(134-141)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1609/aaai.v33i01.3301134
Trieu HTran DIttoo ANguyen L(2019)Leveraging Additional Resources for Improving Statistical Machine Translation on Asian Low-Resource LanguagesACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing10.1145/331493618:3(1-22)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3314936
Hoang CLe ANguyen PPham SHo T(2014)An Efficient Framework for Extracting Parallel Sentences from Non-Parallel CorporaFundamenta Informaticae10.5555/2608442.2608445130:2(179-199)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2608442.2608445
Antonova AMisyurev AZweigenbaum PRapp RSharoff S(2011)Building a web-based parallel corpus and filtering out machine-translated textProceedings of the 4th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora: Comparable Corpora and the Web10.5555/2024236.2024259(136-144)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2024236.2024259
Ion RCeauşu AIrimia EZweigenbaum PRapp RSharoff S(2011)An Expectation Maximization algorithm for textual unit alignmentProceedings of the 4th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora: Comparable Corpora and the Web10.5555/2024236.2024258(128-135)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2024236.2024258
Rasooli MKashefi OMinaei-Bidgoli B(2011)Extracting parallel paragraphs and sentences from english-persian translated documentsProceedings of the 7th Asia conference on Information Retrieval Technology10.1007/978-3-642-25631-8_52(574-583)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-25631-8_52
Li PSun MXue PJoshi AHuang CJurafsky D(2010)Fast-ChampollionProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Posters10.5555/1944566.1944647(710-718)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1944566.1944647
Braune FFraser AJoshi AHuang CJurafsky D(2010)Improved unsupervised sentence alignment for symmetrical and asymmetrical parallel corporaProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Posters10.5555/1944566.1944576(81-89)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1944566.1944576
Li BGaussier EJoshi AHuang CJurafsky D(2010)Improving corpus comparability for bilingual lexicon extraction from comparable corporaProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics10.5555/1873781.1873854(644-652)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1873781.1873854
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