Patent ID: 8060360

Claim:
A method for estimating an alignment between words in a source phrase and words in a target phrase for constructing a word alignment model, comprising: providing at least one set of probabilistic word-dependent transition models, said word-dependent transition models having been automatically learned from at least one training data set comprising known parallel texts representing a source language and a target language; each word-dependent transition model models source word transition probabilities as a combination of a self-jump probability of a particular source language word and probabilities of jumping from that word to other particular source language words; providing a source phrase in the source language and selecting a corresponding word-dependent transition model for each word in the source phrase; constructing a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) on the source phrase from the probabilistic word-dependent transition models for each word of the source phrase in combination with other HMM components including word emission models; evaluating the HMM to determine an alignment between the source phrase and a target phrase in the target language; and storing the alignment between the source phrase and the target phrase to a computer-readable storage device as an entry in a learned word alignment model.