To assist our human ``aligners'' in their work, we developed a number of computer programs, the most important of which is the Manual program, whose purpose is to visualize and manipulate alignments. Manual was implemented as a special ``editing mode'' in the well-known Emacs editor.
With the Manual program, the two texts to align are shown in two separate Emacs windows. To display the alignment itself, Manual uses colors: aligned segments of text (which we call couples ) are displayed on same-color backgrounds. The user can easily navigate the texts in parallel, position the cursor as he wishes, perform searches, etc. But he cannot modify or edit the texts. Since we define an alignment as a parallel segmentation of the texts, what the Manual program will allow the user to do is specify where the texts should be segmented. All of this is done without physically altering the texts: the alignment is recorded separately, as a sequence of pairs of segmentation points.
To modify an alignment, Manual provides a number of editing functions. These basically allow for two types of actions: either split a couple, to produce a pair of couples, or merge two adjacent couples, to produce a single unit. Typically, to create an alignment from scratch, the aligner starts out with a single couple that covers the entirety of the two texts, and repeatedly applies ``splitting'' functions; ``merging'' functions are normally used to correct errors.
Other programs were developed to view, compare, concatenate, split, compute various statistics about and convert alignments to and from various formats. It's amazing just how many silly things you can do with alignments.
All of these programs are publicly available, and can be obtained from the RALI, through our World Wide Web server.