This paper describes the work achieved in the firsthalf of a 4-year cooperative research project ( A R C A D E ) , financed by A U P E L F - U R E F . The project is devoted to the evaluation of parallel text alignment techniques. In its firstperiod ARCADE ran a competition between six systems on a sentence-to-sentence alignment task which yielded two main types of results. First, a large reference bilingual corpus comprising of texts of different genres was created, each presenting various degrees of difficultywith respect to the alignment task. .
