Non-Monotonic Sentence Alignment via Semisupervised Learning

Xiaojun Quan, Chunyu Kit and Yan Song

The 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2013)
Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9, 2013

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Abstract

This paper studies the problem of non-monotonic sentence alignment, motivated by the observation that coupled sentences in real bitexts do not necessarily occur monotonically, and proposes a semisupervised learning approach based on two assumptions: (1) sentences with high affinity in one language tend to have their counterparts with similar relatedness in the other; and (2) initial alignment is readily available with existing alignment techniques. They are incorporated as two constraints into a semisupervised learning framework for optimization to produce a globally optimal solution. The evaluation with real-world legal data from a comprehensive legislation corpus shows that while existing alignment algorithms suffer severely from non-monotonicity, this approach can work effectively on both monotonic and non-monotonic data.

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