You'll take the high road and I'll take the low road
Lars Borin · 2000
While language-independent sentence alignment programs typically achieve a recall in the 90 percent range, the same cannot be said about word alignment systems, where normal recall figures tend to fall somewhere between 20 and 40 percent, in the language-independent case. As words (and phrases) for various reasons are more interesting to align than sentences, we need methods to increase word alignment recall, preferably without sacrificing precision. This paper reports on a series of experiments with pivot alignment, which is the use of one or more additional languages to improve bilingual word alignment. The conclusion is that in a multilingual parallel corpus, pivot alignment is a safe way to increase word alignment recall without lowering the precision.