Patent ID: 8655640

Claim:
A method for aligning linguistic units in paired sequences of units of a stored corpus comprising a plurality of paired sequences of units formed from two languages, the method comprising: determining a plurality of weights, one for each pair of the plurality of paired sequences of units, and maintaining the weights in a computer storage; applying a computer implemented procedure to iteratively update the plurality of weights, including at each iteration for each pair of the paired sequences of units, forming an alignment including aligning units in one sequence of the pair with units of the other sequence of the pair using a parametric alignment procedure using a set of alignment parameters, determining a quality score for the alignment for each of the paired sequences of units, updating the set of alignment parameters using the alignment procedure and dependent on the plurality of weights for the paired sequences, wherein the set of alignment parameters are updated such that paired sequences of units with weights representing a higher quality of alignment are emphasized as compared to paired sequences of units with weights representing a lower quality of alignment, and updating the plurality of weights maintained in the computer storage using the determined quality scores of the alignments; and combining the formed alignments from a plurality of the iterations to determine a combined alignment of units of the paired sequences.