Aligning parallel english-chinese : texts statistically with lexical criteria
Dekai Wu · 1993
We describe our experience with automatic alignment of sentences in parallel EnglishChinese texts. Our report concerns three related topics: (1) progress on the HKUST English-Chinese Parallel Bilingual Corpus; (2) experiments addressing the applicability of Gale & Church's (1991) length-based statistical method to the task of alignment involving a non-Indo-European language; and (3) an improved statistical method that also incorporates domain-specific lexical cues. The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Technical Report Series Department of Computer Science ii 1 Introduction Recently, a number of automatic techniques for aligning sentences in parallel bilingual corpora have been proposed (Kay & Roscheisen 1988; Catizone et al. 1989; Gale & Church 1991; Brown et al. 1991). Such corpora contain the same material that has been translated by human experts into two languages. The goal of alignment is to identify matching sentences between the languages. Alignment is the first...