Bitext Maps and Alignment

Department of Computer Science
New York University

A "bitext" consists of two texts that are mutual translations. A bitext map is a fine-grained description of the correspondence relation between elements of the two halves of a bitext. Finding such a map is the first step to building translation models. It is also the first step in applications like automatic detection of omissions in translations.

Alignments are "watered-down" bitext maps that we can derive from general bitext maps. They are mainly useful for backward compatibility with bitext applications that were developed before we published our methods for producing high-quality general bitext maps.

Available Software

Geometric Mapping and Alignment (GMA) of parallel texts

Key Publications

Chris Pike and I. Dan Melamed (2004). An Automatic Filter for Non-Parallel Texts Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-04) (companion volume), Barcelona, Spain.
I. Dan Melamed (1999). Bitext Maps and Alignment via Pattern Recognition, Computational Linguistics 25(1)107-130, March.
A. Meyers, M. Kosaka, and R. Grishman (1998). "A Multilingual Procedure for Dictionary-Based Sentence Alignment", Proceedings of AMTA'98: Machine Translation and the Information Soup, pages 187-198.
David Graff, I. Dan Melamed, and Paul Morgovsky. (1997) ``Hansard Corpus: Parallel Text in English and French'' on CD-ROM, Linguistic Data Consortium. N.B.: The set-b documentation on the CD contained a couple of errors. The revised version is here .
I. Dan Melamed (1997). A Portable Algorithm for Mapping Bitext Correspondence, 35th Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'97), Madrid, Spain.
I. Dan Melamed (1996). Porting SIMR to New Language Pairs, IRCS Technical Report #96-26.
I. Dan Melamed (1996). A Geometric Approach to Mapping Bitext Correspondence, IRCS Technical Report #96-22, a revised version of the paper presented at the First Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'96), Philadelphia, PA, May.