2Universidade da Beira Interior

Some authors (Simard et al.; Melamed; Danielsson & Mühlenbock) have suggested measures of similarity of words in different languages so as to find extra clues for alignment of parallel texts. Cognate words, like ‘Parliament ’ and ‘Parlement’, in English and French respectively, provide extra anchors that help to improve the quality of the alignment. In this paper, we will extend an alignment algorithm proposed by Ribeiro et al. using typical contiguous and non-contiguous sequences of characters extracted using a statistically sound method (Dias et al.). With these typical sequences, we are able to find more reliable correspondence points and improve the alignment quality without recurring to heuristics to identify cognates