  In this article we address the problem of text passage alignment across
interlingual article pairs in Wikipedia. We develop methods that enable the
identification and interlinking of text passages written in different languages
and containing overlapping information. Interlingual text passage alignment can
enable Wikipedia editors and readers to better understand language-specific
context of entities, provide valuable insights in cultural differences and
build a basis for qualitative analysis of the articles. An important challenge
in this context is the trade-off between the granularity of the extracted text
passages and the precision of the alignment. Whereas short text passages can
result in more precise alignment, longer text passages can facilitate a better
overview of the differences in an article pair. To better understand these
aspects from the user perspective, we conduct a user study at the example of
the German, Russian and the English Wikipedia and collect a user-annotated
benchmark. Then we propose MultiWiki -- a method that adopts an integrated
approach to the text passage alignment using semantic similarity measures and
greedy algorithms and achieves precise results with respect to the user-defined
alignment. MultiWiki demonstration is publicly available and currently supports
four language pairs.
