Sentence Alignment for Monolingual Comparable Corpora

Regina Barzilay, Noemie Elhadad

Abstract: We address the problem of sentence alignment for monolingual corpora, a phenomenon distinct from alignment in parallel corpora. Aligning large comparable corpora automatically would provide a valuable resource for learning of text-to-text rewriting rules. We incorporate context into the search for an optimal alignment in two complementary ways: learning rules for matching paragraphs using topic structure and further refining the matching through local alignment to find good sentence pairs. Evaluation shows that our alignment method outperforms state-of-the-art systems developed for the same task.