ARCADE: a cooperative research project on parallel text alignment evaluation

Abstract

This paper describes the work achieved in the first half of a 4-year cooperative research project (ARCADE), financed by AUPELF-UREF. The project is devoted to the evaluation of parallel text alignment techniques. In its first period ARCADE ran a competition between six systems on a sentence-to-sentence alignment task which yielded two main types of results. First, a large reference bilingual corpus (French-English) has been created, which includes texts of different genres, with various degrees of difficulty for the alignment task. Second, significant methodological progress was made both on the evaluation protocols and metrics, and the algorithms used by the different systems. In the second period, now underway, ARCADE has opened to a larger number of teams and to the problem of word-level alignment.