JMaxAlign: A Maximum Entropy Parallel Sentence Alignment Tool

Parallel corpora are an extremely useful tool in many natural language processing tasks, particularly statistical machine translation. Parallel corpora for certain language pairs, such as Spanish or French, are widely available, but for many language pairs, such as Bengali and Chinese, it is impossible to find parallel corpora. Several tools have been developed to automatically extract parallel data from non–parallel corpora, but they use languagespecific techniques or require large amounts of training data. This paper demonstrates that maximum entropy classifiers can be used to detect parallel sentences between any language pairs with small amounts of training data. This paper is accompanied by JMaxAlign, a Java maxent classifier which can detect parallel sentences.