[CWB] Error cwb-align-import

[Stefan Evert]

> I've managed to import the alignment of two corpora at sentence level. I don't mind to document the process somehow for the encoding tutorial.

Thanks, that would be really neat.

> You can find attached a test data set to reproduce the issue. My question is, is there a way to overcome this error?

Unfortunately not because ...

> This alignment is basically some kind of "word alignment",  Sometimes, depending on the source text unit, the translation is a non-contiguous rendering.

… CWB's alignment attributes are designed for sentence-level alignment (e.g. in a translation memory) and thus ...

> So the tokens involved in the alignment have to be contiguous (not the structural elements). In the example given, this is trivial (one token more or less...), but I have other cases where elements appear much far apart and I don't want to include all the tokens in between.

… alignment beads can only link a contiguous range of tokens in the source corpus to another contiguous range in the target corpus. That's already a big improvement over early versions of CWB, which didn't even allow gaps between different beads or crossing alignments. 

> Although my case is a bit special, I don't think this is an infrequent scenario see Amoia et al. 2011 http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W11-4302.

Certainly, but these are applications that (alignment in) CWB hasn't been designed for.

CWB4, when it eventually arrives, will allow for much more flexible types of alignment.

Best,
Stefan