CLUE-Aligner: An Alignment Tool to Annotate Pairs of Paraphrastic and Translation Units

Currently available alignment tools and procedures for marking-up alignments overlook non-contiguous multiword units for being too complex within the bounds of the proposed alignment methodologies. This paper presents the CLUE-Aligner (Cross-Language Unit Elicitation Aligner), a web alignment tool designed for manual annotation of pairs of paraphrastic and translation units, representing both contiguous and non-contiguous multiwords and phrasal expressions found in monolingual or bilingual parallel sentences. Non-contiguous block alignments are necessary to express alignments between multiwords or phrases, which contain insertions, i.e., words that are not part of the multiword unit or phrase. CLUE-Aligner also allows the alignment of smaller individual or multiword units inside non-contiguous multiword units. The interactive web application was developed under the scope of the eSPERTo project, which aims to build a linguistically enhanced paraphrasing system. However, a tool for manual annotation of alignment and for visualization of automatic phrase alignment can prove useful in human and machine translation evaluation.