Aligning Chinese-English Parallel Parse Trees: Is it Feasible?

We investigate the feasibility of aligning Chinese and English parse trees by examining cases of incompatibility between Chinese-English parallel parse trees. This work is done in the context of an annotation project wherewe construct a parallel treebank by doingword and phrase alignments simultaneously. We discuss the most common incompatibility patterns identified within VPs and NPs and show that most cases of incompatibility are caused by divergent syntactic annotation standards rather than inherent cross-linguistic differences in language itself. This suggests that in principle it is feasible to align the parallel parse trees with somemodification of existing syntactic annotation guidelines. We believe this has implications for the use of parallel parse trees as an important resource for Machine Translation models.