A Portable Algorithm for Mapping Bitext Correspondence

The first step in most empirical work in multilingual NLP is to construct maps of the correspondence between texts and their translations (bitext maps). The Smooth Injective Map Recognizer (SIMR) algorithm presented here is a generic pattern recognition algorithm that is particularly well-suited to mapping bitext correspondence. SIMR is faster and significantly more accurate than other algorithms in the literature. The algorithm is robust enough to use on noisy texts, such as those resulting from OCR input, and on translations that are not very literal. SIMR encapsulates its language-specific heuristics, so that it can be ported to any language pair with a minimal effort.