Parallel Treebanking Spanish-Quechua

Parallel treebanking is greatly facilitated by automatic word alignment. We work on building a trilingual treebank for German, Spanish and Quechua. We ran different alignment experiments on parallel Spanish-Quechua texts, measured the alignment quality, and compared these results to the figures we obtained aligning a comparable corpus of Spanish-German texts. This preliminary work has shown us the best word segmentation to use for the agglutinative language Quechua with respect to alignment. We also acquired a first impression about how well Quechua can be aligned to Spanish, an important prerequisite for bilingual lexicon extraction, parallel treebanking or statistical machine translation.