MEBA is a lexical aligner, implemented in C#, based on an iterative algorithm that uses pre-processing steps: sentence alignment ([[http://www.clarin.eu/tools/sal-sentence-aligner|SAL]]), tokenization, POS-tagging and lemmatization (through [[http://www.clarin.eu/tools/ttl-tokenizing-tagging-and-lemmatizing-free-running-texts|TTL]], sentence chunking. Similar to YAWA aligner, MEBA generates the links step by step, beginning with the most probable (anchor links). The links to be
added at any later step are supported or restricted by the links created in the previous iterations. The aligner has different weights and different significance thresholds on each feature and iteration. Each of the iterations can be configured to align different categories of tokens (named entities, dates and numbers, content words, functional words, punctuation) in decreasing order of statistical evidence.
MEBA has an individual F-measure of 81.71% and it is currently integrated in the platform [[http://www.clarin.eu/tools/cowal-combined-word-aligner|COWAL]].
More detailed descriptions are available in [[http://www.racai.ro/~tufis/papers|the following papers]]:
-- Dan Tufiş (2007). Exploiting Aligned Parallel Corpora in Multilingual Studies and Applications. In Toru Ishida, Susan R. Fussell, and Piek T.J.M. Vossen (eds.), Intercultural Collaboration. First International Workshop (IWIC 2007), volume 4568 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 103-117. Springer-Verlag, August 2007. ISBN 978-3-540-73999-9.
-- -- Dan Tufiş, Radu Ion, Alexandru Ceauşu, and Dan Ştefănescu (2006). Improved Lexical Alignment by Combining Multiple Reified Alignments. In Toru Ishida, Susan R. Fussell, and Piek T.J.M. Vossen (eds.), Proceedings of the 11th Conference EACL2006, pp. 153-160, Trento, Italy, April 2006. Association for Computational Linguistics. ISBN 1-9324-32-61-2.
-- Dan Tufiş, Radu Ion, Alexandru Ceauşu, and Dan Ştefănescu (2005). Combined Aligners. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Building and Using Parallel Texts: Data-Driven Machine Translation and Beyond, pp. 107-110, Ann Arbor, USA, June 2005. Association for Computational Linguistics. ISBN 978-973-703-208-9.
TREQ exploits the knowledge embedded in the parallel corpora and produces a set of
translation equivalents (a translation lexicon), based on a 1:1 mapping
hypothesis. The program uses almost no linguistic knowledge, relying on statistical evidence and some simplifying assumptions.
The extraction process is based on a testing approach. It generates first a list of translation equivalent candidates and then successively extracts the most likely translation equivalence pairs. It does not require a pre-existing bilingual lexicon for the considered languages. Yet, if such a lexicon exists, it can be used to eliminate spurious candidate translation equivalence pairs and thus to speed up the process and increase its accuracy. The algorithm relies on some pre-processing of the bitext: sentence aligner, tokeniser (using [[(http://www.lpl.univaix.fr/projects/multext/MtSeg|MtSeg]]), a collocation extractor (unaware of translation equivalence), POS-tagger, lemmatiser.
More detailed descriptions are available in the following paper (http://www.racai.ro/~tufis/papers/):
-- Dan Tufiş and Ana-Maria Barbu (2002). Revealing translators knowledge: statistical methods in constructing practical translation lexicons for language and speech processing. In International Journal of Speech Technology, volume 5, pp. 199-209. Kluwer Academic Publishers, November 2002. ISSN 1381-2416.
-- Dan Tufiş (2002). A cheap and fast way to build useful translation lexicons. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2002), pp. 1030-1036, Taipei, Taiwan, August 2002. ISBN 1-55860-894.
-- Dan Tufiş and Ana Maria Barbu (2001). Automatic Construction of Translation Lexicons. In V.V.Kluew, C.E. D'Attellis, and N.E. Mastorakis (eds.), Advances in Automation, Multimedia and Video Systems, and Modern Computer Science, pp. 156-161. WSES Press, December 2001. ISSN 1790-5117.
-- Dan Tufiş and Ana Maria Barbu (2001). Extracting Multilingual Lexicons from Parallel Corpora. In Proceedings of the ACH-ALLC conference (ACH-ALLC 2001), New York, USA, June 2001.
-- Dan Tufiş and Ana Maria Barbu (2001). Accurate Automatic Extraction of Translation Equivalents from Parallel Corpora. In Paul Rayson, Andrew Wilson, Tony McEnery, Andrew Hardie, and Shereen Khoja., editors, Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2001 Conference (CL 2001), pp. 581-586, Lancaster, UK, March 2001. Lancaster University, Computing Department. ISBN 1-86220-107-2.