Title

Bilingual alignment of anaphoric expressions

Authors

R. Muñoz (Grupo de Procesamiento del Lenguaje y Sistemas de Información, Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad de Alicante, Spain)

R. Mitkov (Computational Linguistics Group, University of  Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK)

M. Palomar (Grupo de Procesamiento del Lenguaje y Sistemas de Información, Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad de Alicante, Spain)

J. Peral (Grupo de Procesamiento del Lenguaje y Sistemas de Información, Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad de Alicante, Spain)

R. Evans (Computational Linguistics Group, University of Wolverhampton,  Wolverhampton, UK)

L. Moreno (Departamento de Sistemas Inform´aticos y Computación, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain)

C. Orasan (Computational Linguistics Group, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK)

M. Saiz-Noeda (Grupo de Procesamiento del Lenguaje y Sistemas de Información, Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad de Alicante, Spain)

A. Ferrández (Grupo de Procesamiento del Lenguaje y Sistemas de Información, Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad de Alicante, Spain)

C. Barbu (Computational Linguistics Group, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK)

P. Martínez-Barco (Grupo de Procesamiento del Lenguaje y Sistemas de Información, Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad de Alicante, Spain)

A. Suárez (Grupo de Procesamiento del Lenguaje y Sistemas de Información, Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad de Alicante, Spain)

Session

WO23: Corpus Analysis, Annotation, Representation

Abstract

In this paper we present an automatic mechanism for bilingual (Spanish-English) alignment of anaphoric expressions. For this purpose, two anaphora resolution systems were used. Both are based on linguistic preferences and constraints, for Spanish (SUPPAR) and for English (MARS). These systems have been independently developed and each of them is presented individually with their evaluation results. The majority of the paper presents an automatic alignment method for pronominal anaphora in Spanish and English. Once an anaphor has been solved (in both languages) this method matches anaphoric expressions and antecedents from both texts. A bitext map method has been used for the alignment with a set of bilingual texts for the evaluation. These texts have been extracted from several European Community Official documents (EUR-lex database). The alignment mechanism can be applied to different tasks related to Machine Translation such us pattern learning for translation or evaluation for automatic generation  of multilingual anaphora.

Keywords

Bilingual alignment, Anaphoric expressions

Full Paper

164.pdf