The best alignment between paragraphs is determined by minimising a cost metric for alignments, based on the distribution given in Equation 3.1, and prior probabilities for different alignment types.
the cost of an alignment between a set of sentences E (of total length L 1 ) and a foreign set F (of total length L 2 ) is defined by is calculated by integrating the normal distribution given in Equation (3.1) over all values more extreme (further from the mean) than Alignment 0-1 1-1 2-1 2-2 Prior 0.010 0.890 0.089 0.011 Figure 1: Aligning words from non-standard orthographic transcriptions with the Gale-Church Algorithm, using normalised word lengths.