Title
Guidelines for Word Alignment Evaluation and Manual Alignment
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to provide guidelines for building a word alignment evaluation scheme. The notion of word alignment quality depends on the application: here we review standard scoring metrics for full text alignment and give explanations on how to use them better. We discuss strategies to build a reference corpus, and show that the ratio between ambiguous and unambiguous links in the reference has a great impact on scores measured with these metrics. In particular, automatically computed alignments with higher precision or higher recall can be favoured depending on the value of this ratio. Finally, we suggest a strategy to build a reference corpus particularly adapted to applications where recall plays a significant role, like in machine translation. The manually aligned corpus we built for the Spanish-English European Parliament corpus is also described. This corpus is freely available.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1007/s10579-005-4822-5
Language Resources and Evaluation
Keywords
Field
DocType
alignment error rate,bilingual,evaluation,gold standard,manual alignment,parallel corpus,precision,recall,word alignment
Computer science,Computational linguistics,Machine translation,Speech recognition,Natural language processing,Artificial intelligence,Text alignment,Recall
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
39
4
1572-0218
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
22
1.06
13
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Patrik Lambert127723.36
Adrià de Gispert247235.22
Rafael E. Banchs356663.64
José B. Mariño451064.66