?
Improving English-Russian sentence alignment through POS tagging and Damerau-Levenshtein distance
The present paper introduces approach to improve English-Russian sentence alignment, based on POS-tagging of automatically aligned (by HunAlign) source and target texts. The initial hypothesis is tested on a corpus of bitexts. Sequences of POS tags for each sentence (exactly, nouns, adjectives, verbs and pronouns) are processed as “words” and Damerau-Levenshtein distance between them is computed. This distance is then normalized by the length of the target sentence and is used as a threshold between supposedly mis-aligned and “good” sentence pairs. The experimental results show precision 0.81 and recall 0.8, which allows the method to be used as additional data source in parallel corpora alignment. At the same time, this leaves space for further improvement.