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A Lightweight and High Performance Monolingual Word Aligner

Xuchen Yao, Benjamin Van Durme, Chris Callison-Burch and Peter Clark

The 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Short Papers (ACL Short Papers 2013)
Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9, 2013


Abstract

Fast alignment is essential for many natural language tasks. But in the setting of monolingual alignment, previous work has not been able to align more than one sentence pair per second. We describe a discriminatively trained monolingual word aligner that uses a Conditional Random Field to globally decode the best alignment with features drawn from word pairs of source and target sentences. Using just part-of-speech tags and WordNet as external resources, our aligner gives state-of-the-art result, while being an order-of-magnitude faster than the previous best performing system.


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