K-vec

Abstract

Various methods have been proposed for aligning texts in two or more languages such as the Canadian Parliamentary Debates (Hansards). Some of these methods generate a bilingual lexicon as a by-product. We present an alternative alignment strategy which we call K-vec, that starts by estimating the lexicon. For example, it discovers that the English word fisheries is similar to the French pêches by noting that the distribution of fisheries in the English text is similar to the distribution of p&ecirc'ches in the French. K-vec does not depend on sentence boundaries.