2,612 research outputs found

    A Large-Scale Test Set for the Evaluation of Context-Aware Pronoun Translation in Neural Machine Translation

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    The translation of pronouns presents a special challenge to machine translation to this day, since it often requires context outside the current sentence. Recent work on models that have access to information across sentence boundaries has seen only moderate improvements in terms of automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU. However, metrics that quantify the overall translation quality are ill-equipped to measure gains from additional context. We argue that a different kind of evaluation is needed to assess how well models translate inter-sentential phenomena such as pronouns. This paper therefore presents a test suite of contrastive translations focused specifically on the translation of pronouns. Furthermore, we perform experiments with several context-aware models. We show that, while gains in BLEU are moderate for those systems, they outperform baselines by a large margin in terms of accuracy on our contrastive test set. Our experiments also show the effectiveness of parameter tying for multi-encoder architectures.Comment: Accepted at WMT 201

    Selective Attention for Context-aware Neural Machine Translation

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    Despite the progress made in sentence-level NMT, current systems still fall short at achieving fluent, good quality translation for a full document. Recent works in context-aware NMT consider only a few previous sentences as context and may not scale to entire documents. To this end, we propose a novel and scalable top-down approach to hierarchical attention for context-aware NMT which uses sparse attention to selectively focus on relevant sentences in the document context and then attends to key words in those sentences. We also propose single-level attention approaches based on sentence or word-level information in the context. The document-level context representation, produced from these attention modules, is integrated into the encoder or decoder of the Transformer model depending on whether we use monolingual or bilingual context. Our experiments and evaluation on English-German datasets in different document MT settings show that our selective attention approach not only significantly outperforms context-agnostic baselines but also surpasses context-aware baselines in most cases.Comment: Accepted at NAACL-HLT 201

    On context span needed for machine translation evaluation

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    Despite increasing efforts to improve evaluation of machine translation (MT) by going beyond the sentence level to the document level, the definition of what exactly constitutes a ``document level'' is still not clear. This work deals with the context span necessary for a more reliable MT evaluation. We report results from a series of surveys involving three domains and 18 target languages designed to identify the necessary context span as well as issues related to it. Our findings indicate that, despite the fact that some issues and spans are strongly dependent on domain and on the target language, a number of common patterns can be observed so that general guidelines for context-aware MT evaluation can be drawn

    Modeling contextual information in neural machine translation

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    Machine translation has provided impressive translation quality for many language pairs. The improvements over the past few years are largely due to the introduction of neural networks to the field, resulting in the modern sequence-to-sequence neural machine translation models. NMT is at the core of many largescale industrial tools for automatic translation such as Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, Amazon Translate and many others. Current NMT models work on the sentence-level, meaning they are used to translate individual sentences. However, for most practical use-cases, a user is interested in translating a document. In these cases, an MT tool splits a document into individual sentences and translates them independently. As a result, any dependencies between the sentences are ignored. This is likely to result in an incoherent document translation, mainly because of inconsistent translation of ambiguous source words or wrong translation of anaphoric pronouns. For example, it is undesirable to translate “bank” as a “financial bank” in one sentence and then later as a “river bank”. Furthermore, the translation of, e.g., the English third person pronoun “it” into German depends on the grammatical gender of the English antecedent’s German translation. NMT has shown that it has impressive modeling capabilities, but is nevertheless unable to model discourse-level phenomena as it needs access to contextual information. In this work, we study discourse-level phenomena in context-aware NMT. To facilitate the particular studies of interest, we propose several models capable of incorporating contextual information into standard sentence-level NMT models. We direct our focus on several discourse phenomena, namely, coreference (anaphora) resolution, coherence and cohesion. We discuss these phenomena in terms of how well can they be modeled by context-aware NMT, how can we improve upon current state-of-the-art as well as the optimal granularity at which these phenomena should be modeled. We further investigate domain as a factor in context-aware NMT. Finally, we investigate existing challenge sets for anaphora resolution evaluation and provide a robust alternative. We make the following contributions: i) We study the importance of coreference (anaphora) resolution and coherence for context-aware NMT by making use of oracle information specific to these phenomena. ii) We propose a method for improving performance on anaphora resolution based on curriculum learning which is inspired by the way humans organize learning. iii) We investigate the use of contextual information for better handling of domain information, in particular in the case of modeling multiple domains at once and when applied to zero-resource domains. iv) We present several context-aware models to enable us to examine the specific phenomena of interest we already mentioned. v) We study the optimal way of modeling local and global context and present a model theoretically capable of using very large document context. vi) We study the robustness of challenge sets for evaluation of anaphora resolution in MT by means of adversarial attacks and provide a template test set that robustly evaluates specific steps of an idealized coreference resolution pipeline for MT

    Document-Level Language Models for Machine Translation

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    Despite the known limitations, most machine translation systems today still operate on the sentence-level. One reason for this is, that most parallel training data is only sentence-level aligned, without document-level meta information available. In this work, we set out to build context-aware translation systems utilizing document-level monolingual data instead. This can be achieved by combining any existing sentence-level translation model with a document-level language model. We improve existing approaches by leveraging recent advancements in model combination. Additionally, we propose novel weighting techniques that make the system combination more flexible and significantly reduce computational overhead. In a comprehensive evaluation on four diverse translation tasks, we show that our extensions improve document-targeted scores substantially and are also computationally more efficient. However, we also find that in most scenarios, back-translation gives even better results, at the cost of having to re-train the translation system. Finally, we explore language model fusion in the light of recent advancements in large language models. Our findings suggest that there might be strong potential in utilizing large language models via model combination.Comment: accepted at WMT 202

    Improving Long Context Document-Level Machine Translation

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    Document-level context for neural machine translation (NMT) is crucial to improve the translation consistency and cohesion, the translation of ambiguous inputs, as well as several other linguistic phenomena. Many works have been published on the topic of document-level NMT, but most restrict the system to only local context, typically including just the one or two preceding sentences as additional information. This might be enough to resolve some ambiguous inputs, but it is probably not sufficient to capture some document-level information like the topic or style of a conversation. When increasing the context size beyond just the local context, there are two challenges: (i) the~memory usage increases exponentially (ii) the translation performance starts to degrade. We argue that the widely-used attention mechanism is responsible for both issues. Therefore, we propose a constrained attention variant that focuses the attention on the most relevant parts of the sequence, while simultaneously reducing the memory consumption. For evaluation, we utilize targeted test sets in combination with novel evaluation techniques to analyze the translations in regards to specific discourse-related phenomena. We find that our approach is a good compromise between sentence-level NMT vs attending to the full context, especially in low resource scenarios.Comment: accepted at CODI 2023 (ACL workshop
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