Aligments also form the basis for learning multi-lingual word embeddings (Faruqui and Dyer, 2014;Lu et al., 2015) and in the projection of syntactic and semantic annotations from one language to another (Hwa et al., 2005;McDonald et al., 2011).
there is still a prominent role for word alignment in NLP; research into improvements in word alignment is a worthy goal.