Patent Document ID: 9020804
Application ID: 11756684

Base Claim:
1. An alignment method comprising: with a computing device, for a source sentence in a source language, prior to word level alignment of the source sentence with a target sentence in a target language, identifying whether the sentence includes at least one candidate term comprising a contiguous subsequence of words of the source sentence; aligning the target sentence in the target language with the source sentence, comprising: developing a probabilistic model which models conditional probability distributions for alignments between words of the source sentence and words of the target sentence; and generating an optimal alignment based on the probabilistic model, including, where the source sentence includes the at least one candidate term, enforcing a contiguity constraint which requires that all the words of the target sentence which are aligned with an identified candidate term form a contiguous subsequence of the target sentence.

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Claim 2:
2. The alignment method of claim 1 , wherein the optimal alignment accepts at least some reordering of the words in the target sentence which are aligned to the words in the source sentence.