[Corpora-List] WORD ALIGNMENT: Does it exist?

[Alberto Simões]

Hello

I defend that word alignment is term alignment, and possible term with 
blanks or placeholders alignment, and possible alignment to empty words 
(just like we have sentence alignment to empty sentences).

I agree that 100% of word alignment might be difficult or even 
impossible (for compound verbs, for instance).

But calling it a joke can be offending to people working on that area, 
and getting some interesting results (me one of them >:))

Cheers
ambs

On 01/06/2011 15:28, Xu Jiajin wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The other day, over an academic discussion, my colleague and I had a
> brief debate on WORD ALIGNMENT, while we were talking about bilingual
> text aligning practices. When I was reviewing different levels of
> alignment, such as sentence alignment and word alignment, I commented
> that WORD ALIGNMENT IS A JOKE, as it is never likely to aligning words.
> My comment was immediately refuted by another professor. But I have not
> been convinced by his counterargument so far.
>
> In my mind, word alignment is not realistic since it’s impossible to
> find one-to-one correspondence of parallel texts on the word level. For
> instance, it’s most likely that words in a sentence are not translated,
> either kept implicit or assimilated into other words, constructions,
> idioms and so forth. I reckon it is also the case for parallel texts of
> cognate languages.
>
> But on a second thought, the alignment of a selection of words, say,
> lexical words, or jargons, across texts is not impossible. However,
> linguistic alignment, as I see it, has to be exhaustive. In saying so, I
> actually consider sentence alignment as the canonical type of text
> alignment. Each sentence is aligned to one or more sentences in the
> target texts, and the other way round.
>
> I am wondering whether there ARE word alignment implementations in
> practice. I would appreciate any pointers to relevant literature or
> tools, as well as the clarification of the notion alignment.
>
> Maybe due to my ignorance, word alignment has been a mature technology
> for many years. Could anyone tell me what are main uses of word
> alignment? Bilingual lexicon? Any other applications?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jiajin XU
>
> Ph.D., associate professor (discourse studies, corpus linguistics)
>
> National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education
>
> Beijing Foreign Studies University
>
> Beijing 100089
>
> China
>
>
>
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-- 
Alberto Simoes
CCTC-UM / CEHUM

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