Challenge: Existing word alignment methods rely on manual data and lack generalization ability.
Approach: They propose to use a weakly-supervised large-scale weakly supervised dataset for word alignment pre-training via span prediction to reduce the need for manual data.
Outcome: The proposed method improves upon the best supervised baseline by 3.3 6.1 points in F1 and 1.5 6.1 point in AER.

Similar Papers

SpanAlign: Sentence Alignment Method based on Cross-Language Span Prediction and ILP (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for automatic sentence alignment assume monotonic alignments, but they can handle non-monotonic alignments.
Approach: They propose a method to automatically extract parallel sentences from noisy parallel documents by embeddings and encoding each source and target sentence.
Outcome: The proposed method improves translation accuracy by 4.1 BLEU scores on English-Japanese . it can predict spans in target document from sentences in source document .
BinaryAlign: Word Alignment as Binary Sequence Labeling (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: State-of-the-art word alignment training methods require a different class depending on the availability of gold data for a particular language pair.
Approach: They propose a novel word alignment technique based on binary sequence labeling that outperforms existing approaches in both scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing models on non-English language pairs and performs stratified error analysis over alignment error type.
A Supervised Word Alignment Method based on Cross-Language Span Prediction using Multilingual BERT (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: supervised word alignment tools such as GIZA++, MGIZA (Gao and Vogel, 2008) and FastAlign remain stagnant in terms of word alignment accuracy.
Approach: They propose a supervised word alignment method based on cross-language span prediction by formalizing a word alignment problem as a collection of independent predictions from a token in the source sentence to a span in the target sentence.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly outperforms previous supervised and unsupervised word alignment methods without any bitexts for pretraining.
SimAlign: High Quality Word Alignments Without Parallel Training Data Using Static and Contextualized Embeddings (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Word alignments are useful for statistical and neural machine translation (NMT) and cross-lingual annotation projection.
Approach: They propose to leverage multilingual word embeddings for word alignment.
Outcome: The proposed methods perform better for four languages and comparable for two languages than traditional statistical aligners even with abundant parallel data.
SentAlign: Accurate and Scalable Sentence Alignment (2023.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: SentAlign is an automatic sentence alignment tool designed for large documents . it evaluates all possible alignment paths in documents of thousands of sentences .
Approach: They present a sentence alignment tool that evaluates all possible alignment paths in parallel documents of thousands of sentences and uses a divide-and-conquer approach to align documents containing tens of thousands.
Outcome: The proposed tool outperforms five other sentence alignment tools on two evaluation sets and on a downstream machine translation task.
PMI-Align: Word Alignment With Point-Wise Mutual Information Without Requiring Parallel Training Data (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent studies show that using contextualized embeddings from pre-trained multilingual language models could give us high quality word alignments without the need of parallel training data.
Approach: They propose a method which uses contextualized embeddings from pre-trained language models to extract word alignments without parallel training.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms rival methods on five out of six language pairs.
Improving Word Alignment Using Semi-Supervised Learning (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing word alignment methods rely on labeled data, but augmenting training with pseudo-labeled data improves performance.
Approach: They propose a semi-supervised framework to improve word alignment methods . they use pseudo-labeled data from multilingual encoder models as word aligners .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art binary alignment method on word alignment datasets.
Meeting the Needs of Low-Resource Languages: The Value of Automatic Alignments via Pretrained Models (2023.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Large multilingual models have inspired a new class of word alignment methods, which work well for pretraining languages.
Approach: They propose to use transformer-based word alignment methods to extract alignments from massive pretrained models.
Outcome: The proposed methods outperform traditional methods for languages unseen to pretraining models, and are competitive with each other.
Word Alignment by Fine-tuning Embeddings on Parallel Corpora (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing work on word alignment has focused on unsupervised learning on parallel text.
Approach: They propose to combine pre-trained contextualized word embeddings with multilingually trained language models to achieve competitive results on word alignment tasks.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on five language pairs and can train multilingual word aligners that can obtain robust performance on different language pairs.
SilverAlign: MT-Based Silver Data Algorithm for Evaluating Word Alignment (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Word alignments are crucial for a variety of NLP tasks.
Approach: They propose a method to automatically create silver data for evaluation of word aligners by exploiting machine translation and minimal pairs.
Outcome: The proposed method correlates with gold benchmarks for 9 language pairs, making it a valid resource for evaluation of different languages and domains when gold data is not available.

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