Introduction:

MASSAlign is a Python 2 library for the alignment and annotation of comparable documents. It offers 3 main functionalities:

• Paragraph-level alignment between comparable documents
• Sentence-level alignment between comparable paragraphs or documents
• Word-level annotation of modification operations between aligned sentences

MASSAlign uses a technique called vicinity-driven alignment, described here:

• Gustavo H. Paetzold and Lucia Specia. Vicinity-Driven Paragraph and Sentence Alignment for Comparable Corpora. arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.04113.

MASSAlign is excellent for extracting simplifications from complex/simple parallel documents! These papers are evidence:

• Gustavo H. Paetzold and Lucia Specia. Lexical Simplification with Neural Ranking. Proceedings of the 2017 EACL.
• Fernando Alva-Manchego, Joachim Bingel, Gustavo H. Paetzold, Carolina Scarton and Lucia Specia. Learning how to Simplify from Explicit Labeling of Complex-Simplified Text Pairs. Proceedings of the 2017 IJCNLP.

Installation:

To install MASSAlign, you must:

1. Download and unpack MASSAlign's github repository.
2. Navigate to the root folder.
3. Run the following command line:

python setup.py install

Documentation:

MASSAlign's documentation can be found here.

Examples:

You can learn how to use MASSAlign here.

Citing:

If you use MASSAlign, please cite this paper:

• Gustavo H. Paetzold, Fernando Alva-Manchego and Lucia Specia. MASSAlign: Alignment and Annotation for Comparable Documents. Proceedings of the 2017 IJCNLP.

License:

MASSAlign is distributed under the LGPL v3.0 license.