Measuring the impact of cognates in parallel text alignment

Abstract

This paper evaluates the impact of considering cognates for aligning parallel texts using our aligner. By considering that two words may be cognates if their similarity is higher than a certain threshold and if they are automatically selected as aligners, we tested different degrees of cognativeness, by varying threshold values. A new methodology to measure the quality of resulting alignments is presented. Two language pairs are addressed: Portuguese-Spanish, and Portuguese-English