The Use of MSVM and HMM for Sentence Alignment

Abstract

In this paper, two new approaches to align English-Arabic sentences in bilingual parallel corpora based on the Multi-Class Support Vector Machine (MSVM) and the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) classifiers are presented. A feature vector is extracted from the text pair that is under consideration. This vector contains text features such as length, punctuation score, and cognate score values. A set of manually prepared training data was assigned to train the Multi-Class Support Vector Machine and Hidden Markov Model. Another set of data was used for testing. The results of the MSVM and HMM outperform the results of the length based approach. Moreover these new approaches are valid for any language pairs and are quite flexible since the feature vector may contain less, more, or different features, such as a lexical matching feature and Hanzi characters in Japanese-Chinese texts, than the ones used in the current research.