Parallel text alignment

Abstract

Parallel Text Alignment (PTA) is the automatic content alignment of multiple text documents originating or derived from the same source. Such an alignment allows for more powerful retrieval of document contents due to the addition of translation approaches to the retrieval problem. The implications of this result in improving multimedia data access in digital library applications, range from facilitating the analysis of multiple English language translations of classical texts to enabling on-demand and random comparison of multiple transcriptions derived from a given audio stream or associated with a given stream of video, audio, or images. In this paper we present an efficient algorithm for achieving such an alignment, and demonstrate its use with two applications. This result is an application of the new framework of Cross-Modal Information Retrieval recently developed at Dartmouth College and Michigan State University.