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Improving Word Alignment Using Alignment of Deep Structures

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Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5729))

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Abstract

In this paper, we describe differences between a classical word alignment on the surface (word-layer alignment) and an alignment of deep syntactic sentence representations (tectogrammatical alignment). The deep structures we use are dependency trees containing content (autosemantic) words as their nodes. Most of other functional words, such as prepositions, articles, and auxiliary verbs are hidden. We introduce an algorithm which aligns such trees using perceptron-based scoring function. For evaluation purposes, a set of parallel sentences was manually aligned. We show that using statistical word alignment (GIZA++) can improve the tectogrammatical alignment. Surprisingly, we also show that the tectogrammatical alignment can be then used to significantly improve the original word alignment.

The work on this project was supported by the grants GAUK 9994/2009, GAČR 201/09/H057, and GAAV ČR 1ET101120503.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic

    David Mareček

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  1. David Mareček
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Wet Bohemia at Pilsen, Czech Republic

    Václav Matoušek

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Univerzitni 8, 30614, Plzen, Czech Republic

    Pavel Mautner

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Mareček, D. (2009). Improving Word Alignment Using Alignment of Deep Structures. In: Matoušek, V., Mautner, P. (eds) Text, Speech and Dialogue. TSD 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5729. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04208-9_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04208-9_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04207-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04208-9

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