Word Alignment in English-Hindi Parallel Corpus Using Recency-Vector Approach: Some Studies

Niladri Chatterjee, Saumya Agrawal

Abstract: Word alignment using recency-vector based approach has recently become popular. One major advantage of these techniques is that unlike other approaches they perform well even if the size of the parallel corpora is small. This makes these algorithms worth-studying for languages where resources are scarce. In this work we studied the performance of two very popular recency-vector based approaches, proposed in (Fung and McKeown, 1994) and (Somers, 1998), respectively, for word alignment in English-Hindi parallel corpus. But performance of the above algorithms was not found to be satisfactory. However, subsequent addition of some new constraints improved the performance of the recency-vector based alignment technique significantly for the said corpus. The present paper discusses the new version of the algorithm and its performance in detail.