O. Scrivner, T. Gilmanov SWIFT ALIGNER: A TOOL FOR THE VISUALIZATION AND CORRECTION OF WORD ALIGNMENT AND FOR CROSS LANGUAGE TRANSFER

It is well known that parallel corpora are valuable linguistic resources. One of the benefits of such corpora is that they allow for the building an annotated corpus for resource-poor languages via crosslanguage transfer. That is, given accurate alignment between a word from a source language and its equivalent in a target language, some linguistic information, such as part-of-speech tags or syntactic annotation, can be projected to the aligned word. While there are several state-of-the-art word-aligners, such as GIZA++ and Berkeley, there is no simple visual tool that would enable correcting and editing aligned corpora of different formats. We have developed Swift Aligner, a free portable software that facilitates the visual representation corpora, the correction of alignment and finally the transfer of morphological information and syntactic relations from an annotated source language into an unannotated target language, by means of word-alignment. In addition, this tool is flexible, as it imports corpora in various formats, such as GIZA++, Berkeley, and LIHLA. Finally, we have also shown that by using cross-language transfer, we would need only an estimated 30% of correction by human annotator, compared to 100% of manual annotation.