3,143 research outputs found
Discourse Structure in Machine Translation Evaluation
In this article, we explore the potential of using sentence-level discourse
structure for machine translation evaluation. We first design discourse-aware
similarity measures, which use all-subtree kernels to compare discourse parse
trees in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Then, we show
that a simple linear combination with these measures can help improve various
existing machine translation evaluation metrics regarding correlation with
human judgments both at the segment- and at the system-level. This suggests
that discourse information is complementary to the information used by many of
the existing evaluation metrics, and thus it could be taken into account when
developing richer evaluation metrics, such as the WMT-14 winning combined
metric DiscoTKparty. We also provide a detailed analysis of the relevance of
various discourse elements and relations from the RST parse trees for machine
translation evaluation. In particular we show that: (i) all aspects of the RST
tree are relevant, (ii) nuclearity is more useful than relation type, and (iii)
the similarity of the translation RST tree to the reference tree is positively
correlated with translation quality.Comment: machine translation, machine translation evaluation, discourse
analysis. Computational Linguistics, 201
Entropy and Graph Based Modelling of Document Coherence using Discourse Entities: An Application
We present two novel models of document coherence and their application to
information retrieval (IR). Both models approximate document coherence using
discourse entities, e.g. the subject or object of a sentence. Our first model
views text as a Markov process generating sequences of discourse entities
(entity n-grams); we use the entropy of these entity n-grams to approximate the
rate at which new information appears in text, reasoning that as more new words
appear, the topic increasingly drifts and text coherence decreases. Our second
model extends the work of Guinaudeau & Strube [28] that represents text as a
graph of discourse entities, linked by different relations, such as their
distance or adjacency in text. We use several graph topology metrics to
approximate different aspects of the discourse flow that can indicate
coherence, such as the average clustering or betweenness of discourse entities
in text. Experiments with several instantiations of these models show that: (i)
our models perform on a par with two other well-known models of text coherence
even without any parameter tuning, and (ii) reranking retrieval results
according to their coherence scores gives notable performance gains, confirming
a relation between document coherence and relevance. This work contributes two
novel models of document coherence, the application of which to IR complements
recent work in the integration of document cohesiveness or comprehensibility to
ranking [5, 56]
Coherence in Machine Translation
Coherence ensures individual sentences work together to form a meaningful document. When properly translated, a coherent document in one language should result in a coherent document in another language. In Machine Translation, however, due to reasons of modeling and computational complexity, sentences are pieced together from words or phrases based on short context windows and
with no access to extra-sentential context.
In this thesis I propose ways to automatically assess the coherence of machine translation output. The work is structured around three dimensions: entity-based coherence, coherence as evidenced via syntactic patterns, and coherence as
evidenced via discourse relations.
For the first time, I evaluate existing monolingual coherence models on this new task, identifying issues and challenges that are specific to the machine translation setting. In order to address these issues, I adapted a state-of-the-art syntax
model, which also resulted in improved performance for the monolingual task. The results clearly indicate how much more difficult the new task is than the task of detecting shuffled texts. I proposed a new coherence model, exploring the crosslingual transfer of discourse relations in machine translation. This model is novel in that it measures the correctness of the discourse relation by comparison to the source text rather than to a reference translation. I identified patterns of incoherence common across different language pairs, and created a corpus of machine translated output annotated with coherence errors for evaluation purposes. I then examined
lexical coherence in a multilingual context, as a preliminary study for crosslingual transfer. Finally, I determine how the new and adapted models correlate with human judgements of translation quality and suggest that improvements in general evaluation within machine translation would benefit from having a coherence component that evaluated the translation output with respect to the source text
When a Good Translation is Wrong in Context: Context-Aware Machine Translation Improves on Deixis, Ellipsis, and Lexical Cohesion
Though machine translation errors caused by the lack of context beyond one
sentence have long been acknowledged, the development of context-aware NMT
systems is hampered by several problems. Firstly, standard metrics are not
sensitive to improvements in consistency in document-level translations.
Secondly, previous work on context-aware NMT assumed that the sentence-aligned
parallel data consisted of complete documents while in most practical scenarios
such document-level data constitutes only a fraction of the available parallel
data. To address the first issue, we perform a human study on an
English-Russian subtitles dataset and identify deixis, ellipsis and lexical
cohesion as three main sources of inconsistency. We then create test sets
targeting these phenomena. To address the second shortcoming, we consider a
set-up in which a much larger amount of sentence-level data is available
compared to that aligned at the document level. We introduce a model that is
suitable for this scenario and demonstrate major gains over a context-agnostic
baseline on our new benchmarks without sacrificing performance as measured with
BLEU.Comment: ACL 2019 (camera-ready
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