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Building a Golden Collection of Parallel Multi-Language Word Alignment

This paper reports an experience on producing manual word alignments over six different language pairs (all combinations between Portuguese, English, French and Spanish) (Graça et al., 2008). Word alignment of each language pair is made over the first 100 sentences of the common test set from the Europarl corpora (Koehn, 2005), corresponding to 600 new annotated sentences. This collection is publicly available at http://www.l2f.inesc- id.pt/resources/translation/. It contains, to our knowledge, the first word alignment gold set for the Portuguese language, with three other languages. Besides, it is to our knowledge, the first multi-language manual word aligned parallel corpus, where the same sentences are annotated for each language pair. We started by using the guidelines presented at (Mariño, 2005) and performed several refinements: some due to under-specifications on the original guidelines, others because of disagreement on some choices. This lead to the development of an extensive new set of guidelines for multi-lingual word alignment annotation that, we believe, makes the alignment process less ambiguous. We evaluate the inter-annotator agreement obtaining an average of 91.6% agreement between the different language pairs.