Although it is easy to construct a pt-es bi-text from the Europarl corpus, we chose not to do so since, in general, synthe-sizing a bi-text for X 1 -X 2 would be impossible: e.g., it cannot be done for ml-in given our training datasets for in-en and ml-en since the English sides of these bi-texts have no sentences in common.
we extracted the list of likely cognates between Portuguese and Spanish from the training pt-en and es-en bi-texts using English as a pivot as follows: We started with IBM model 4 word alignments, from which we extracted four conditional lexical translation probabilities: Pr(p j |e i ) and Pr(e i |p j ) for Portuguese-English, and Pr(s k |e i ) and Pr(e i |s k ) for Spanish-English, where p j , e i and s k stand for a Portuguese, an English and a Spanish word respectively.