Improving the accuracy of English-Arabic statistical sentence alignment

Abstract EN

Multilingual natural language processing systems are increasingly relying on parallel corpus to ameliorate their output.

Parallel corpora constitute the basic block for training a statistical natural language processing system and creating translation and language models.

Several systems have been devised that automatically align words of a pair of sentences, each in a language.

Such systems have been used successfully with European languages.

In this paper, one such system is used to align sentences in an English-Arabic corpus.

The system works poorly given raw unaligned sentence English-Arabic sentence pairs.

This prompted the development of a preprocessing step to be applied to the Arabic sentences.

The same corpus was then preprocessed and a significant improvement is reported when alignment is attempted using the preprocessed unaligned sentences.