MT-based Sentence Alignment for OCR-generated Parallel Texts

Rico Sennrich, Martin Volk


Abstract
The performance of current sentence alignment tools varies according to the to-be-aligned texts. We have found existing tools unsuitable for hard-to-align parallel texts and describe an alternative alignment algorithm. The basic idea is to use machine translations of a text and BLEU as a similarity score to find reliable alignments which are used as anchor points. The gaps between these anchor points are then filled using BLEU-based and length-based heuristics. We show that this approach outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in our alignment task, and that this improvement in alignment quality translates into better SMT performance. Furthermore, we show that even length-based alignment algorithms profit from having a machine translation as a point of comparison.
Anthology ID:
2010.amta-papers.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Research Papers
Month:
October 31-November 4
Year:
2010
Address:
Denver, Colorado, USA
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AMTA
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Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2010.amta-papers.14
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Cite (ACL):
Rico Sennrich and Martin Volk. 2010. MT-based Sentence Alignment for OCR-generated Parallel Texts. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Research Papers, Denver, Colorado, USA. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
MT-based Sentence Alignment for OCR-generated Parallel Texts (Sennrich & Volk, AMTA 2010)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2010.amta-papers.14.pdf