A Model for Fine-Grained Alignment of Multilingual Texts

While alignment of texts on the sentential level is often seen as being too coarse, and word alignment as being too fine-grained, bi- or multilingual texts which are aligned on a level in-between are a useful resource for many purposes. Starting from a number of examples of non-literal translations, which tend to make alignment difficult, we describe an alignment model which copes with these cases by explicitly coding them. The model is based on predicate-argument structures and thus covers the middle ground between sentence and word alignment. The model is currently used in a recently initiated project of a parallel English-German treebank (FuSe), which can in principle be extended with additional languages.

Annotating Predicate-Argument Structure for a Parallel Treebank

We report on a recently initiated project which aims at building a multi-layered parallel treebank of English and German. Particular attention is devoted to a dedicated predicate-argument layer which is used for aligning translationally equivalent sentences of the two languages. We describe both our conceptual decisions and aspects of their technical realisation. We discuss some selected problems and conclude with a few remarks on how this project relates to similar projects in the field.