Improving Word Alignment of Rare Words with Word Embeddings

We address the problem of inducing word alignment for language pairs by developing an unsupervised model with the capability of getting applied to other generative alignment models. We approach the task by: i) proposing a new alignment model based on the IBM alignment model 1 that uses vector representation of words, and ii) examining the use of similar source words to overcome the problem of rare source words and improving the alignments. We apply our method to English-French corpora and run the experiments with different sizes of sentence pairs. Our results show competitive performance against the baseline and in some cases improve the results up to 6.9% in terms of precision.