Sentence alignment in DPC: maximizing precision, minimizing human effort

Publication type
C1
Publication status
Published
Authors
Trushkina, J., Macken, L., & Paulussen, H.
Editor
N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odjik, S. Piperidis, and D. Tapias
Series
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Pagination
485-488
Publisher
European Language Resources Association (Marrakech, Morocco)
Download
(.pdf)
Project
DPC

Abstract

A wide spectrum of multilingual applications have aligned parallel corpora as their prerequisite. The aim of the project described in this paper is to build a multilingual corpus where all sentences are aligned at very high precision with a minimal human effort involved. The experiments on a combination of sentence aligners with different underlying algorithms described in this paper showed that by verifying only those links which were not recognized by at least two aligners, an error rate can be reduced by 93.76% as compared to the performance of the best aligner. Such manual involvement concerned only a small portion of all data (6%). This significantly reduces a load of manual work necessary to achieve nearly 100% accuracy of alignment.