An Algorithm for Aligning Sentences in Bilingual Corpora Using Lexical Information

Abstract

In this paper we describe an algorithm for aligning sentences with their translations in a bilingual corpus using lexical information of the languages. Existing efficient algorithms ignore word identities and consider only the sentence lengths (Brown, 1991; Gale and Church, 1993). For a sentence in the source language text, the proposed algorithm picks the most likely translation from the target language text using lexical information and certain heuristics. It does not do statistical analysis using sentence lengths. The algorithm is language independent. It also aids in detecting addition and deletion of text in translations. The algorithm gives comparable results with the existing algorithms in most of the cases while it does better in cases where statistical algorithms do not give good results.