Summary of the paper

Title Automatic word alignment tools to scale production of manually aligned parallel texts
Authors Stephen Grimes, Katherine Peterson and Xuansong Li
Abstract We have been creating large-scale manual word alignment corpora for Arabic-English and Chinese-English language pairs in genres such as newsire, broadcast news and conversation, and web blogs. We are now meeting the challenge of word aligning further varieties of web data for Chinese and Arabic """"dialects"""". Human word alignment annotation can be costly and arduous. Alignment guidelines may be imprecise or underspecified in cases where parallel sentences are hard to compare -- due to non-literal translations or differences between language structures. In order to speed annotation, we examine the effect that seeding manual alignments with automatic aligner output has on annotation speed and accuracy. We use automatic alignment methods that produce alignment results which are high precision and low recall to minimize annotator corrections. Results suggest that annotation time can be reduced by up to 20%, but we also found that reviewing and correcting automatic alignments requires more time than anticipated. We discuss throughout the paper crucial decisions on data structures for word alignment that likely have a significant impact on our results.
Topics Corpus (creation, annotation, etc.), Machine Translation, SpeechToSpeech Translation, MultiWord Expressions & Collocations
Full paper Automatic word alignment tools to scale production of manually aligned parallel texts
Bibtex @InProceedings{GRIMES12.487,
  author = {Stephen Grimes and Katherine Peterson and Xuansong Li},
  title = {Automatic word alignment tools to scale production of manually aligned parallel texts},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)},
  year = {2012},
  month = {may},
  date = {23-25},
  address = {Istanbul, Turkey},
  editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Mehmet Uğur Doğan and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
  isbn = {978-2-9517408-7-7},
  language = {english}
 }
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