# SentAlign: Accurate and Scalable Sentence Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08982 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08982/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07291/) (2019)
- [Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01852/) (2020)
- [Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10464/) (2018)
- [On the Impact of Various Types of Noise on Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12282/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Single-to-mix Modality Alignment with Multimodal Large Language Model for Document Image Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07572/) (2025)
- [LLMs for Translation: Historical, Low-Resourced Languages and Contemporary AI Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11898/) (2025)
- [AlignAR: Generative Sentence Alignment for Arabic-English Parallel Corpora of Legal and Literary Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21842/) (2025)
- [OmniAlign: A Unified Multilingual Aligner for Word and Sentence Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18474/) (2026)
- [STAR : Sentence Translation Alignment Rate for Document-to-Document Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27161/) (2026)
- [Cogs in a Machine, Doing What They're Meant to Do -- The AMI Submission to the WMT24 General Translation Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03381/) (2024)
- [Align and Shine: Building High-Quality Sentence-Aligned Corpora for Multilingual Text Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09476/) (2026)
- [MameLoshnLM: Yiddish Language Model and Evaluation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05850/) (2026)
- [When Do Agents Help? Embedding, LLM and Agentic Alignment of Classical Texts and Their Translations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33691/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present SentAlign, an accurate sentence alignment tool designed to handle very large parallel document pairs. Given user-defined parameters, the alignment algorithm evaluates all possible alignment paths in fairly large documents of thousands of sentences and uses a divide-and-conquer approach to align documents containing tens of thousands of sentences. The scoring function is based on LaBSE bilingual sentence representations. SentAlign outperforms five other sentence alignment tools when evaluated on two different evaluation sets, German-French and English-Icelandic, and on a downstream machine translation task.