Aligning Bilingual Literary Works: a Pilot Study

Electronic versions of literary works abound on the Internet and the rapid dissemination of electronic readers will make electronic books more and more common. It is often the case that literary works exist in more than one language, suggesting that, if properly aligned, they could be turned into useful resources for many practical applications, such as writing and language learning aids, translation studies, or data-based machine translation. To be of any use, these bilingual works need to be aligned as precisely as possible, a notoriously difficult task. In this paper, we revisit the problem of sentence alignment for literary works and explore the performance of a new, multi-pass, approach based on a combination of systems. Experiments conducted on excerpts of ten masterpieces of the French and English literature show that our approach significantly outperforms two open source tools.