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Hi Stephanie,<br>
Thanks, as always, for your quick and precise answers. One or two
other follow-up questions below... but please do not feel obliged to
answer, these are really just to help me understand things a little
better, if you have a free minute.<br>
Best wishes,<br>
Graham.<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Le 10/07/2026 à 08:43, Stephanie Evert
a écrit :<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:D9616B48-9385-45ED-A64E-1C34FD57CA5B@collocations.de">
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<p style="color:#222222;"> <span
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Ce courrier est envoyé par un correspondant externe</p>
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<div
style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;">Hi
Graham!<br id="lineBreakAtBeginningOfMessage">
<div><br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div><span style="font-family: ArialMT;">I have a quick
question regarding parallel corpora set up. Does the
cwb-align command actually do the alignment, as I
understand it does, from the terminal messages, and, if
so, is it possible to override the cwb alignment to
impose one's own alignment?</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Correct. cwb-align ist the actual sentence aligner and
does indeed use a rather simplistic and old-fashioned
algorithm. It outputs the alignment in a text format
(basically listing start/end corpus positions of
corresponding regions in source and target corpus), which is
then indexed with cwb-align-encode for use with CWB.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Which means that you can "simply" generate your own
alignment in this text format and then run cwb-align-encode.
You can also preview your alignment with cwb-align-show
first to check that you've got the format right. </div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
So as I understand this, given that my s tags are one-to-one
correspondancse, it would be enough for me to upload an .align file
reading 1 <TAB> 1, 2 <TAB> 2, etc.?<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:D9616B48-9385-45ED-A64E-1C34FD57CA5B@collocations.de">
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<div><br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div><span style="font-family: ArialMT;"> I'm asking because
I remember reading that the cwb-align command was not a
very efficient aligner, and so far I prefer to do the
alignment myself in advance, and to give cwb-align files
with exactly the same number of alignment fields (s
tags). Despite this, I have the impression that the
command can knock this initial, hand-checked alignment
out of kilter, which is a shame, and so an override
flag, if it existed, would be nice.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>If you have a pre-alignment (which might be at a
different level than sentences), you can indicate this to
cwb-align, which will force the aligner to only consider
sentence correspondences that are consistent with the
pre-alignment. A trick I've sometimes used is to specify the
same s-attribute that encodes the pre-alignment (keep in
mind that there must be a single region for each
pre-alignment block) as alignment grid, which keeps
cwb-align from making any changes.</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
Does this mean that, since I specify alignment on s tags in
cwb-align, I should be getting what I want to achieve anyway?
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:D9616B48-9385-45ED-A64E-1C34FD57CA5B@collocations.de">
<div
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<div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>It is usually much easier, though, to use
cwb-align-import from the CWB/Perl modules. This script is
intended to import an external alignment given in terms of
sentence IDs (which must be annotated in the corpus via an
s-attribute). From its documentation:</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div style="font-family: monospace; white-space: pre;"> As an example, the line
id_1 id_2 id_3 <TAB> id_2 id_3 [ <TAB> ... ]
indicates that the first three sentences of the source corpus are
aligned to the second and third sentence of the target corpus. Further
TAB-delimited fields (e.g. specifying the confidence in an alignment
bead) are silently ignored.</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
My pre-alignement is tagged <s> ... </s> which
generally, but not always, correspond to sentences. As I understand
it, I'd need to tag it <s id="1"> ... </s>, etc. Is that
right? If so, could it just, trivially, be a question of added the
"id" attribute incrementally to the already present "s" tags in
order to run cwb-align-import with my pre-aligned material?
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:D9616B48-9385-45ED-A64E-1C34FD57CA5B@collocations.de">
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<div>
<div><br>
</div>
<br>
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<div><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; float: none; display: inline !important;">A
related question: what does the "no alignments found"
message most often mean? I'm setting up a three-way
corpus English-French-Polish. The source text is
English, the French and Polish texts are translations
but, since the alignments are based on the English, I
would like to be able to provide the option for
searching in one translated corpus, and looking for the
equivalent in the other translated corpus. So far,
things work perfectly Eng-Fre and Eng-Pol but I get the
"no alignments found" message when searching in
"Fre-Pol" and yet I think I've set it all up
identically...</span><br
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;">
</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<br>
<div>"no alignment found" is the message you get if a query
match in your source corpus isn't aligned to the target
corpus. Since alignments don't have to cover the corpus
completely, this may well happen.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>However, if you always get the message, there's something
wrong with the Fre-Pol alignment. Perhaps a first step would
be to use cwb-align-decode on the French corpus to see which
alignment beads you actually have.</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
Thank you for this... I'll check again.
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<div>Hope this helps,</div>
<div>Stephanie</div>
</div>
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