mALIGNa is a program for aligning documents on the sentence level. It contains implementations of a few groups of alignment algorithms - algorithms based exclusively on the sentence length (Gale and Church, Brown), algorithms based on the connections between words (Moore's algorithm), as well as any variation and intersection of these algorithms. The aim of alignment is to obtain a bilingual corpus. It can be used for creating translation memories, translation by analogy, modelling probabilistic dictionaries and other applications. More information about maligna can be found in an article which I co-authored (see Resources section).
mALIGNa library is available on Maven central. See pom.xml for details.
JVM 1.6 is required to run the program. To build the program both JDK 1.6 and Maven are required. Theoretically, the program is platform independent (like Java), but it was tested only on Linux and Windows.
Aligning documents consists of several stages, which may be performed in different ways. Therefore, the text interface of the program is divided into several independent commands. A common feature of the commands is that they read input text from standard input and write the results to standard output, always using the native format .al. Therefore these programs act as filters and may be combined in a pipe using |. Below is a brief description of each command, you can get more information about exact parameters of individual commands using the option --help. At the end of this document, there is a complete example of text alignment using several commands connected in a pipeline.
The parse command is used to convert an external format to the native format .al. It also allows you to combine several documents into one, by giving a list of files as arguments. It accepts input files as arguments and writes the result to standard output. This command can only occur at the beginning of the pipeline.
The 'format' command is used to convert the native format .al to an external format. It reads data from standard input and writes the result to the files given as arguments. This command can only occur at the end of the pipeline.
Align command. Segments of each of the input mappings are aligned independently, thanks to which alignment can be performed at different levels of accuracy (document, paragraph, sentence), by performing consecutive alignment operations, and then dividing the results into smaller and smaller segments. Filter; may be used at any point of the pipeline.
This command performs modifications on every mapping, replacing source and target lists of segments with other lists of segments. Both the amount of the segments and their contents may be changed (e.g. merge segments in one, split segment into more segments or remove unnecessary whitespace in each segment). Filter; may be used at any point of the pipeline.
Basing on certain criteria, chooses from the input list of mappings only some mappings and writes them to standard output. Eg. using this command you can choose only the most probable mappings or only 1 - 1 mappings. Filter; may be used at any point of the pipeline.
This command is used for comparing two files of alignments with each other, provided as arguments, returning the degree of their similarity (precision, recall) and the differences occurring. Used for test purposes outside the pipeline.
This command manipulates translation, language and length models. Currently not fully implemented. Used outside the pipeline.
Executes a set of predefined filtering commands, like doing a Moore alignment. Created to simplify complex operations and improve the performance. Filter; may be used at any point of the pipeline.
Runs the program's automatic tests.
Below I have given examples of pipelines of commands that that should be used to align two documents in .txt files and write the results as two .txt files. The output documents will contain the same number of sentences, one per line, and sentences of corresponding numbers should be mutual translations. The commands given below will do everything required, however it is worth remembering that sometimes it's better to preserve the intermediate results of the operations of each command in temporary files instead of redirecting them directly to the next command for debugging purposes. This example should be executed in the main directory of the project. Ready to run example scripts can be found in the examples/scripts directory.
bin/maligna parse -c txt examples/txt/poznan-pl.txt examples/txt/poznan-de.txt | \
bin/maligna modify -c split-sentence | \
bin/maligna modify -c trim | \
bin/maligna align -c viterbi -a poisson -n word -s iterative-band | \
bin/maligna select -c one-to-one | \
bin/maligna format -c txt poznan-pl-align.txt poznan-de-align.txt
Another interesting case is alignment using Moore's algorithm, which requires a properly aligned corpus to build a translation model. To do this you must perform several groups of commands.
Split a text into sentences and clean them up:
bin/maligna parse -c txt examples/txt/poznan-pl.txt examples/txt/poznan-de.txt | \
bin/maligna modify -c split-sentence | \
bin/maligna modify -c trim > \
poznan-split.al
Align using sentence length-based algorithm (Brown, Gale and Church) and select most probable alignments:
cat poznan-split.al | \
bin/maligna align -c viterbi -a poisson -n word -s iterative-band | \
bin/maligna select -c one-to-one | \
bin/maligna select -c fraction -f 0.85 > \
poznan-align-length.al
Finally align using Moore's algorithm:
cat poznan-split.al | \
bin/maligna align -c viterbi -a translation -n word -s iterative-band -t poznan-align-length.al > \
poznan-align.al
Most commands expect input and output in the native format .al. To use a different format, you must parse the input using the parse command. To get the result in another format, you need to format it using the format command.
This is the native format for alignment files. Contains all necessary information for each mapping: lists of source and target segments and mapping score (-log(probability)). If mapping score is equal to "-INF" then all commands ignore this mapping, no operation is performed on it. This feature can be used to mark manual, human-aligned fragments to be preserved in the result.
The standard format for translation memories, supported by many tools. Both an input and output format. For the full specification see http://www.lisa.org/standards/tmx/tmx.html.
Plain text, in the form of two files in two languages. On input the whole file is treated as one segment. On output, successive lines of files correspond to mappings and are mutual translations (which implies that numbers of lines are equal).
An output format which presents an alignment in a human readable manner.
In the program a few alignment algorithms were implemented, and thanks to the flexibility of the code it is easy to add new algorithms, modify the existing ones and join their results together.
This is a fast bilingual text alignment algorithm. The algorithm counts the probability of each possible mapping, which depends on ratio of lengths of sentences in each language. Next it finds alignment for the whole text with maximum probability (calculated as a product of individual mapping probabilities). Details can be found in the Gale and Church article, referenced in resources.
This is a modern algorithm based not only on the length of sentences but also on their contents. The first phase of operation of this algorithm is alignment based on length (for example using Gale and Church algorithm described above). Next, from this alignment only 1 - 1 mappings alignments are selected, and from them only the most probable ones (e.g. 80% probability) are selected. In this manner a relatively well aligned corpus is yielded. Later a translation model (IBM Model 1) and unigram language models are built based on this corpus. In the final alignment, probability of the translation of the source sentence to the target sentence is taken into account (calculated on the basis of the translation model and the language models). Details can be found in the Moore article, referenced in the resources.
- A new tool for the bilingual text aligning at the sentence level, Krzysztof Jassem, Jarek Lipski, Proceedings of Intelligent Information Systems Conference 2008, Zakopane, Poland, http://iis.ipipan.waw.pl/2008/proceedings/iis08-27.pdf
- A Program for Aligning Sentences in Bilingual Corpora, William A. Gale, Kenneth Ward Church
- Fast and Accurate Sentence Alignment of Bilingual Corpora, Robert C. Moore
- Jarek Lipski - creation of the project, design and programming
- Jimmy O'Regan - translation of readme file to English
I wrote this program during my studies in Machine Translation, and later I expanded it as practical part of a master's thesis. Currently it is being developed as an open-source project and used by various other projects. Happy aligning!
-- Jarek Lipski