Methods and Practical Issues in Evaluating Alignment Techniques

This paper describes the work achieved in the #rst half of a 4-year cooperative research project #ARCADE#, #nanced byAUPELF-UREF. The project is devoted to the evaluation of parallel text alignment techniques. In its #rst period ARCADE ran a competition between six systems on a sentence-to-sentence alignment task which yielded two main types of results. First, a large reference bilingual corpus comprising of texts of di#erent genres was created, each presenting various degrees of di#culty with respect to the alignment task. Second, signi#cant methodological progress was made both on the evaluation protocols and metrics, and the algorithms used by the different systems. For the second phase, which is now underway, ARCADE has been opened to a larger number of teams who will tackle the problem of word-level alignment. 1 Introduction In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in parallel text alignment techniques. These techniques attempt to map various textual units to th..