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 interested in weighing how it could be useful in solving linguistic problems, moving from a statistical 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 version in another natural language. Procrustes rotations are introduced in a statistical framework 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 of our proposal.