A model for finegrained alignment of multilingual texts

While alignment of texts on the sentential level is often seen as being too coarse, and word align-ment as being too ne-grained, bi- or multi-lingual texts which are aligned on a level in-between are a useful resource for many pur-poses. Starting from a number of examples of non-literal translations, which tend to make alignment dicult, we describe an alignment model which copes with these cases by explicitly coding them. The model is based on predicate-argument structures and thus covers the middle ground between sentence and word alignment. The model is currently used in a recently initi-ated project of a parallel English-German tree-bank (FuSe), which can in principle be extended with additional languages.