  The first step in most empirical work in multilingual NLP is to construct
maps of the correspondence between texts and their translations ({\bf bitext
maps}). The Smooth Injective Map Recognizer (SIMR) algorithm presented here is
a generic pattern recognition algorithm that is particularly well-suited to
mapping bitext correspondence. SIMR is faster and significantly more accurate
than other algorithms in the literature. The algorithm is robust enough to use
on noisy texts, such as those resulting from OCR input, and on translations
that are not very literal. SIMR encapsulates its language-specific heuristics,
so that it can be ported to any language pair with a minimal effort.
