Automatic Alignment of English-Chinese Bilingual Texts of CNS News

In this paper we address a method to align EnglishChinese bilingual news reports from China News Service, combining both lexical and statistical approaches. Because of the sentential structure differences between English and Chinese, matching at the sentence level as in many other works may result in frequent matching of several sentences en masse. In view of this, the current work also attempts to create shorter alignment pairs by permitting finer matching between clauses from both texts if possible. The current method is based on statistical correlation between sentence or clause length of both texts and at the same time uses obvious anchors such as numbers and place names appearing frequently in the news reports as lexical cues.