Evaluation of Methods for Sentence and Lexical Alignment of Brazilian Portuguese and English Parallel Texts

Abstract

Abstract.Parallel texts, i.e., texts in one language and their translations to other languages, are very useful nowadays for many applications such as machine translation and multilingual information retrieval. If these texts are aligned in a sentence or lexical level their relevance increases considerably. In this paper we describe some experiments that have being carried out with Brazilian Portuguese and English parallel texts by the use of well known alignment methods: five methods for sentence alignment and two methods for lexical alignment. Some linguistic resources were built for these tasks and they are also described here. The results have shown that sentence alignment methods achieved 85.89% to 100% precision and word alignment methods, 51.84% to 95.61% on corpora from different genres.