Improved Sentence Alignment for Movie Subtitles
Jörg Tiedemann, G. Angelova, K. Bontcheva, R. Mitkov, N. Nicolov, N. Nikolov · 2007
Sentence alignment is an essential step in building a parallel corpus. In this paper a specialized approach for the alignment of movie subtitles based on time overlaps is introduced. It is used for creating an extensive multilingual parallel subtitle corpus currently containing about 21 million aligned sentence fragments in 29 languages. Our alignment approach yields significantly higher accuracies compared to standard length-based approaches on this data. Furthermore, we can show that simple heuristics for subtitle synchronization can be used to improve the alignment accuracy even further.