Alignment of Paragraphs in Bilingual Texts using Bilingual Dictionaries and Dynamic Programming *

Abstract. Parallel text alignment is a special type of pattern recognition task aimed to discover the similarity between two sequences of symbols. Given the same text in two different languages, the task is to decide which elements--paragraphs in case of paragraph alignment---in one text are translations of which elements of the other text. One of the applications is training training statistical machine translation algorithms. The task is not trivial unless detailed text understanding can be afforded. In our previous work we have presented a simple technique that relied on bilingual dictionaries but does not perform any syntactic analysis of the texts. In this paper we give a formal definition of the task and present an exact optimization algorithm for finding the best alignment.