diff --git a/.gitignore b/.gitignore
index d60b6215..c0a2807d 100644
--- a/.gitignore
+++ b/.gitignore
@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@ Release/
 *.nupkg
 .vs/
 .vscode/
+.idea/
 
 build*/
 artifacts/
diff --git a/src/shared_library/thot.cc b/src/shared_library/thot.cc
index d8029f21..b4da90f3 100644
--- a/src/shared_library/thot.cc
+++ b/src/shared_library/thot.cc
@@ -1092,6 +1092,17 @@ extern "C"
   {
     auto alignmentModel = static_cast<AlignmentModel*>(swAlignModelHandle);
 
+    if (matrix == nullptr)
+    {
+      // Retrieve the dimensions of the training alignment matrix for sentence pair n
+      Count c;
+      std::vector<std::string> srcSentence, trgSentence;
+      alignmentModel->getSentencePair(n, srcSentence, trgSentence, c);
+      *iLen = (unsigned int)srcSentence.size();
+      *jLen = (unsigned int)trgSentence.size();
+      return SMALL_LG_NUM;
+    }
+    
     WordAlignmentMatrix waMatrix;
     LgProb prob = alignmentModel->getTrainingAlignment(n, waMatrix);
     // A filtered/out-of-range pair yields an empty matrix, so clamp to its actual