Procrustes techniques for Text Mining

This paper aims at exploring the capability of the so called Latent Semantic Analysis applied to a multilingual context. In particular we are interestedin weighing how it could be useful in solving linguistic problems, moving from astatistical point of view. Here we focus on the possibility of evaluating the goodness of a translation by comparing the latent structures of the original text and its versionin another natural language. Procrustes rotations are introduced in a statisticalframework as a tool for reaching this goal. An application on one year of Le Monde Diplomatique and the corresponding Italian edition will show the effectiveness ofour proposal.