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

[Graeme Hirst]

Also see Jörg Tiedemann's book "Bitext Alignment", which is about to be published (probably this week!) by Morgan & Claypool (morganclaypool.com) in their HLT Synthesis series.  It includes a 45-page chapter on word alignment.



On 1 Jun 2011, at 10:58, Afsaneh Fazly wrote:

> Look at these two (among many others):
> 
> The Mathematics of Statistical Machine Translation: Parameter Estimation.
> Peter E Brown, Vincent J. Della Pietra, Stephen A. Della Pietra,
> Robert L. Mercer
> Computational Linguistics, 1993.
> 
> The alignment template approach to statistical machine translation.
> Franz Josef Och and Hermann Ney.
> Computational Linguistics, 30:417–449. 2004.
> 
> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 10:28 AM, Xu Jiajin <ustcxujj at gmail.com> 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
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
>> Corpora mailing list
>> Corpora at uib.no
>> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
>> 
>> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
> Corpora mailing list
> Corpora at uib.no
> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora


--
::::  Graeme Hirst
::::  University of Toronto * Department of Computer Science




_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora