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It was pointed out that many people didn't have access to my
"Alignment" chapter in the Handbook of Natural Language Processing.
Happily, CRC Press has (very kindly!) granted me permission to post the
full PDF as as a free sample chapter.<br>
<br>
You can download it from
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.cs.ust.hk/~dekai/library/WU_Dekai/Wu_Alignment2010.pdf">http://www.cs.ust.hk/~dekai/library/WU_Dekai/Wu_Alignment2010.pdf</a><br>
<br>
As summarized by Xu Jiajin: "The chapter has been extensively revised
for the new second edition (2010), edited by N. Indurkhya & F.J.
Damerau, Chapman and Hall / CRC Press, pp.367-408. (It covers token vs
segmental alignments, at word, phrase/collocation, and sentence levels.
Starting from flat models, it progressively moves to
compositional/hierarchical models that can handle the sorts of
constructions and idioms you are thinking about, using biparsing with
transduction grammars.)"<br>
<br>
Hope this helps!<br>
<br>
-- <br>
Prof. Dekai Wu <font color="grey"> | </font> <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:dekai@cs.ust.hk">dekai@cs.ust.hk</a> <font
color="grey"> | </font> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.cs.ust.hk/~dekai">http://www.cs.ust.hk/~dekai</a><br>
HKUST Human Language Technology Center<br>
Department of Computer Science and Engineering<br>
University of Science & Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong<br>
<font color="grey">tel</font> +852 2358.7000 <font color="grey"> |
dir</font> +852 2358.6989 <font color="grey"> | fax</font> +852
2358.1477<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Xu Jiajin wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:BANLkTikU-gPUyH9v28qKb3YBzJEQYR6vMw@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;" lang="EN-GB">Two
days ago, I asked
about Word Alignment, which was kindly responded by eight
colleagues (<span class="gd">Alberto Simões, Afsaneh Fazly, Mark
Sammons, Graeme
Hirst, Felipe Sánchez Martínez, Dekai Wu</span><span class="go">, </span><span
class="gd">Michael Barlow, and João Graça</span>). </span></font>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-GB"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-GB">One of my first observations
from the informative responses is that most of, with one or two
exceptions, colleagues are from the department of Computer Science, and
works
in the Computational Linguistics. This might be a perfect excuse that I
was not
aware of the enormous work done in Word Alignment, as I am a linguist
with a theoretical
flavour. :) :). Most linguists in contrastive linguistics and
translation studies see sentence alignment as the only reliable and
viable correspondence of linguistic units. However, when we look around
and beyond the scope of pure language studies, the aligning work is far
more than sentence alignment, especially after the discussion.<br>
</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-GB"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-GB">I’d summarize the
discussions as follows:</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-GB">Word Alignments are
used in a variety of applications.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-GB">1. All Statistical
Machine Translation systems, starting from word alignments to extract
translation units.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-GB">2. Jointly training
models in different languages and coupling them for better learning.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-GB">3. Passing annotations
from one language to the other.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-GB">There are several good
implementations of word alignments, Poscat, Berkley aligner, GIZA++
(Franz Och),
mkcls (Franz Och) just to name a few.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-GB"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-GB">Word alignments do not
have to be one to one, they can be many to many and hence we can have
phrase
alignments.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-US">--the
above adapted from </span><span class="gd"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-GB">João
Graça</span></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span class="gd"><span
style="color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> </span></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><font
size="2"><span lang="EN-US">Word alignment is term alignment to some
extent, and possible term with
blanks or placeholders alignment, and possible alignment to empty words
(just
like we have sentence alignment to empty sentences).</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><font
size="2"><span lang="EN-US">100% of word alignment might be difficult
or even impossible (for
compound verbs, for instance).</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><font
size="2"><span lang="EN-US">Calling it ‘a joke’ (The inappropriate
wording in my target post) can be
offending to people </span><span style="color: black;" lang="EN-US">working
on word alignment.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-US">--the
above adapted from <img moz-do-not-send="true"
src="file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/User/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image001.gif"
class="QrVm3d" name="upi" height="1" width="1">Alberto
Simões</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB">Related
implementations and literature </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB">The
Mathematics of Statistical Machine
Translation: Parameter Estimation.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="IT">Peter E Brown,
Vincent J. Della Pietra, Stephen A. Della Pietra,</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB">Robert L.
Mercer Computational Linguistics,
1993.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB">The alignment
template approach to
statistical machine translation.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB">Franz Josef
Och and Hermann Ney.
Computational Linguistics, 30:417–449. 2004.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB">Jörg
Tiedemann's book "Bitext
Alignment", which is about to be published (probably this week!) by
Morgan
& Claypool (<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://morganclaypool.com">morganclaypool.com</a>) in their HLT
Synthesis series.<span> </span>It includes a 45-page chapter on word
alignment. (provided by Graeme Hirst)</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB">Word alignment
implementations have been
around for a while: GIZA++ (<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://code.google.com/p/giza-pp/">http://code.google.com/p/giza-pp/</a>)
is the most
used, but there are other word aligners such as BerkeleyAligner
(<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://code.google.com/p/berkeleyaligner">http://code.google.com/p/berkeleyaligner</a>).</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB">GIZA++
implements the alignments models
described in</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB">Och, Franz
Josef, and Hermann Ney (2003)
"A Systematic Comparison of Various Statistical Alignment Models." </span><span
lang="IT">Computational Linguistics 29(1): 19-51.
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J03/J03-1002.pdf">http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J03/J03-1002.pdf</a></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="IT"><span> </span></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB">Dekai Wu’s
"Alignment" chapter in
the Handbook of Natural Language Processing.<span>
</span>The chapter has been extensively revised for the new second
edition
(2010), edited by N. Indurkhya & F.J. Damerau, Chapman and Hall /
CRC
Press, pp.367-408. (It covers token vs segmental alignments, at word,
phrase/collocation, and sentence levels. Starting from flat models, it
progressively moves to compositional/hierarchical models that can
handle the
sorts of constructions and idioms you are thinking about, using
biparsing with
transduction grammars.)</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-GB"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span style="color: black;"
lang="EN-GB">Thanks go to all
the participants of the discussion, which is enlightening and
informative indeed.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></font></p>
<font size="2"></font>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB">Best wishes,</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB"><br>
</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB">Jiajin XU</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2"><span lang="EN-GB">Beijing
Foreign Studies University</span></font></p>
<pre wrap="">
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