Mirabela Navlea

Using Cognates to Improve Lexical Alignment Systems

In this paper, we describe a cognate detection module integrated into a lexical alignment system for French and Romanian. Our cognate detection module uses lemmatized, tagged and sentence-aligned legal parallel corpora. As a first step, this module apply a set of orthographic adjustments based on orthographic and phonetic similarities between French - Romanian pairs of words. Then, statistical techniques and linguistic information (lemmas, POS tags) are combined to detect cognates from our corpora. We automatically align the set of obtained cognates and the multiword terms containing cognates. We study the impact of cognate detection on the results of a baseline lexical alignment system for French and Romanian. We show that the integration of cognates in the alignment process improves the results.