A major open problem in neural machine translation (NMT) is the translation of idiomatic expressions, such as "under the weather". The meaning of these expressions is not composed by the meaning of their constituent words, and NMT models tend to translate them literally (i.e., word-by-word), which leads to confusing and nonsensical translations. Research on idioms in NMT is limited and obstructed by the absence of automatic methods for quantifying these errors. In this work, first, we propose a novel metric for automatically measuring the frequency of literal translation errors without human involvement. Equipped with this metric, we present controlled translation experiments with models trained in different conditions (with/without the test-set idioms) and across a wide range of (global and targeted) metrics and test sets. We explore the role of monolingual pretraining and find that it yields substantial targeted improvements, even without observing any translation examples of the test-set idioms. In our analysis, we probe the role of idiom context. We find that the randomly initialized models are more local or "myopic" as they are relatively unaffected by variations of the idiom context, unlike the pretrained ones.
Peking University（北京大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Idiom translation is a challenging problem in machine translation because the meaning of idioms is non-compositional, and a literal (word-by-word) translation is likely to be wrong. In this paper, we focus on evaluating the quality of idiom translation of MT systems. We introduce a new evaluation method based on an idiom-specific blacklist of literal translations, based on the insight that the occurrence of any blacklisted words in the translation output indicates a likely translation error. We introduce a dataset, CIBB (Chinese Idioms Blacklists Bank), and perform an evaluation of a state-of-…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Leiden University（莱顿大学）
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been widely used in recent years with significant improvements for many language pairs. Although state-of-the-art NMT systems are generating progressively better translations, idiom translation remains one of the open challenges in this field. Idioms, a category of multiword expressions, are an interesting language phenomenon where the overall meaning of the expression cannot be composed from the meanings of its parts. A first important challenge is the lack of dedicated data sets for learning and evaluating idiom translation. In this paper we address this …
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Unlike literal expressions, idioms' meanings do not directly follow from their parts, posing a challenge for neural machine translation (NMT). NMT models are often unable to translate idioms accurately and over-generate compositional, literal translations. In this work, we investigate whether the non-compositionality of idioms is reflected in the mechanics of the dominant NMT model, Transformer, by analysing the hidden states and attention patterns for models with English as source language and one of seven European languages as target language. When Transformer emits a non-literal translation…
Idioms are an important language phenomenon in Chinese, but idiom translation is notoriously hard. Current machine translation models perform poorly on idiom translation, while idioms are sparse in many translation datasets. We present PETCI, a parallel English translation dataset of Chinese idioms, aiming to improve idiom translation by both human and machine. The dataset is built by leveraging human and machine effort. Baseline generation models show unsatisfactory abilities to improve translation, but structure-aware classification models show good performance on distinguishing good transla…
Applied Intelligence Research Centre（应用智能研究中心）；School of Computing（计算学院）；Dublin Institute of Technology（都柏林理工学院）
Idioms pose problems to almost all Machine Translation systems. This type of language is very frequent in day-to-day language use and cannot be simply ignored. The recent interest in memory augmented models in the field of Language Modelling has aided the systems to achieve good results by bridging long-distance dependencies. In this paper we explore the use of such techniques into a Neural Machine Translation system to help in translation of idiomatic language.
In todays digital world automated Machine Translation of one language to another has covered a long way to achieve different kinds of success stories. Whereas Babel Fish supports a good number of foreign languages and only Hindi from Indian languages, the Google Translator takes care of about 10 Indian languages. Though most of the Automated Machine Translation Systems are doing well but handling Indian languages needs a major care while handling the local proverbs/ idioms. Most of the Machine Translation system follows the direct translation approach while translating one Indian language to o…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Facebook AI（Facebook人工智能）
Idiomatic expressions (IEs) play an essential role in natural language. In this paper, we study the task of idiomatic sentence paraphrasing (ISP), which aims to paraphrase a sentence with an IE by replacing the IE with its literal paraphrase. The lack of large-scale corpora with idiomatic-literal parallel sentences is a primary challenge for this task, for which we consider two separate solutions. First, we propose an unsupervised approach to ISP, which leverages an IE's contextual information and definition and does not require a parallel sentence training set. Second, we propose a weakly sup…
Yangzhou University（扬州大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）
Idioms, are a kind of idiomatic expression in Chinese, most of which consist of four Chinese characters. Due to the properties of non-compositionality and metaphorical meaning, Chinese Idioms are hard to be understood by children and non-native speakers. This study proposes a novel task, denoted as Chinese Idiom Paraphrasing (CIP). CIP aims to rephrase idioms-included sentences to non-idiomatic ones under the premise of preserving the original sentence's meaning. Since the sentences without idioms are easier handled by Chinese NLP systems, CIP can be used to pre-process Chinese datasets, there…
We demonstrate, in this study, that an open-domain conversational system trained on idioms or figurative language generates more fitting responses to prompts containing idioms. Idioms are part of everyday speech in many languages, across many cultures, but they pose a great challenge for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems that involve tasks such as Information Retrieval (IR) and Machine Translation (MT), besides conversational AI. We utilize the Potential Idiomatic Expression (PIE)-English idioms corpus for the two tasks that we investigate: classification and conversation generati…
MobileTeleSystems（移动电信系统公司）；Sberbank of Russia（俄罗斯联邦储蓄银行）；National Research University Higher School of Economics（国家研究型高等经济大学）
Applications such as machine translation, speech recognition, and information retrieval require efficient handling of noun compounds as they are one of the possible sources for out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In-depth processing of noun compounds requires not only splitting them into smaller components (or even roots) but also the identification of instances that should remain unsplitted as they are of idiomatic nature. We develop a two-fold deep learning-based approach of noun compound splitting and idiomatic compound detection for the German language that we train using a newly collected corp…
Learning idiomatic expressions is seen as one of the most challenging stages in second language learning because of their unpredictable meaning. A similar situation holds for their identification within natural language processing applications such as machine translation and parsing. The lack of high-quality usage samples exacerbates this challenge not only for humans but also for artificial intelligence systems. This article introduces a gamified crowdsourcing approach for collecting language learning materials for idiomatic expressions; a messaging bot is designed as an asynchronous multipla…
G-IdiomAlign: A Gloss-Pivoted Benchmark for Cross-Lingual Idiom Alignment
NLP 2 CT Lab, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau（NLP 2 CT实验室，计算机与信息科学系，澳门大学）；Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau（人文学院，澳门大学）
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）
We present the results of the application of a grammatical test suite for German$\rightarrow$English MT on the systems submitted at WMT19, with a detailed analysis for 107 phenomena organized in 14 categories. The systems still translate wrong one out of four test items in average. Low performance is indicated for idioms, modals, pseudo-clefts, multi-word expressions and verb valency. When compared to last year, there has been a improvement of function words, non-verbal agreement and punctuation. More detailed conclusions about particular systems and phenomena are also presented.
This article presents an original method for Text-to-Sign Translation. It compensates data scarcity using a domain-specific parallel corpus of alignments between text and hierarchical formal descriptions of Sign Language videos in AZee. Based on the detection of similarities present in the source text, the proposed algorithm recursively exploits matches and substitutions of aligned segments to build multiple candidate translations for a novel statement. This helps preserving Sign Language structures as much as possible before falling back on literal translations too quickly, in a generative wa…
In machine translation it is common phenomenon that machine-readable dictionaries and standard parsing rules are not enough to ensure accuracy in parsing and translating English phrases into Korean language, which is revealed in misleading translation results due to consequent structural and semantic ambiguities. This paper aims to suggest a solution to structural and semantic ambiguities due to the idiomaticity and non-grammaticalness of phrases commonly used in English language by applying bilingual phrase database in English-Korean Machine Translation (EKMT). This paper firstly clarifies wh…
Vocabulary selection, or lexical shortlisting, is a well-known technique to improve latency of Neural Machine Translation models by constraining the set of allowed output words during inference. The chosen set is typically determined by separately trained alignment model parameters, independent of the source-sentence context at inference time. While vocabulary selection appears competitive with respect to automatic quality metrics in prior work, we show that it can fail to select the right set of output words, particularly for semantically non-compositional linguistic phenomena such as idiomat…
Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute（阿尔伯塔机器智能研究所）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
We describe the University of Alberta systems for the SemEval-2022 Task 2 on multilingual idiomaticity detection. Working under the assumption that idiomatic expressions are noncompositional, our first method integrates information on the meanings of the individual words of an expression into a binary classifier. Further hypothesizing that literal and idiomatic expressions translate differently, our second method translates an expression in context, and uses a lexical knowledge base to determine if the translation is literal. Our approaches are grounded in linguistic phenomena, and leverage ex…
Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad（印度信息技术学院，阿拉哈巴德）
In this paper, an extended combined approach of phrase based statistical machine translation (SMT), example based MT (EBMT) and rule based MT (RBMT) is proposed to develop a novel hybrid data driven MT system capable of outperforming the baseline SMT, EBMT and RBMT systems from which it is derived. In short, the proposed hybrid MT process is guided by the rule based MT after getting a set of partial candidate translations provided by EBMT and SMT subsystems. Previous works have shown that EBMT systems are capable of outperforming the phrase-based SMT systems and RBMT approach has the strength …
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）
This paper describes a test suite submission providing detailed statistics of linguistic performance for the state-of-the-art German-English systems of the Fifth Conference of Machine Translation (WMT20). The analysis covers 107 phenomena organized in 14 categories based on about 5,500 test items, including a manual annotation effort of 45 person hours. Two systems (Tohoku and Huoshan) appear to have significantly better test suite accuracy than the others, although the best system of WMT20 is not significantly better than the one from WMT19 in a macro-average. Additionally, we identify some l…
Attention Mechanism and Context Modeling System for Text Mining Machine Translation
Boston University（波士顿大学）；Duke University（杜克大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）
This report presents an automatic evaluation of the general machine translation task of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT22). It evaluates a total of 185 systems for 21 translation directions including high-resource to low-resource language pairs and from closely related to distant languages. This large-scale automatic evaluation highlights some of the current limits of state-of-the-art machine translation systems. It also shows how automatic metrics, namely chrF, BLEU, and COMET, can complement themselves to mitigate their own limits in terms of interpretability and accuracy.
University of St Andrews（圣安德鲁斯大学）；School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）
By using a trigram model and fine-tuning a pretrained BERT model for sequence classification, we show that machine translation and human translation can be classified with an accuracy above chance level, which suggests that machine translation and human translation are different in a systematic way. The classification accuracy of machine translation is much higher than of human translation. We show that this may be explained by the difference in lexical diversity between machine translation and human translation. If machine translation has independent patterns from human translation, automatic…
INESC-ID（里斯本系统与计算机工程研究所）；Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学）；ISCTE-IUL（里斯本大学学院）
Discourse markers are universal linguistic events subject to language variation. Although an extensive literature has already reported language specific traits of these events, little has been said on their cross-language behavior and on building an inventory of multilingual lexica of discourse markers. This work describes new methods and approaches for the description, classification, and annotation of discourse markers in the specific domain of the Europarl corpus. The study of discourse markers in the context of translation is crucial due to the idiomatic nature of these structures. Multili…
Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University（里昂第三大学）；Linguistics Research Center - Corpus, Discourse and Societies（语言学研究中心 - 语料库、话语与社会）；ILCEA4-CREO (Grenoble Alpes University)（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学ILCEA4-CREO）
Based on an annotated multimedia corpus, television series Mar{ā}y{ā} 2013, we dig into the question of ''automatic standardization'' of Arabic dialects for machine translation. Here we distinguish between rule-based machine translation and statistical machine translation. Machine translation from Arabic most of the time takes standard or modern Arabic as the source language and produces quite satisfactory translations thanks to the availability of the translation memories necessary for training the models. The case is different for the translation of Arabic dialects. The productions are much …
Neural sequence to sequence learning recently became a very promising paradigm in machine translation, achieving competitive results with statistical phrase-based systems. In this system description paper, we attempt to utilize several recently published methods used for neural sequential learning in order to build systems for WMT 2016 shared tasks of Automatic Post-Editing and Multimodal Machine Translation.
Attention-based Encoder-Decoder has the effective architecture for neural machine translation (NMT), which typically relies on recurrent neural networks (RNN) to build the blocks that will be lately called by attentive reader during the decoding process. This design of encoder yields relatively uniform composition on source sentence, despite the gating mechanism employed in encoding RNN. On the other hand, we often hope the decoder to take pieces of source sentence at varying levels suiting its own linguistic structure: for example, we may want to take the entity name in its raw form while tak…
The parallel corpus for multilingual NLP tasks, deep learning applications like Statistical Machine Translation Systems is very important. The parallel corpus of Hindi-English language pair available for news translation task till date is of very limited size as per the requirement of the systems are concerned. In this work we have developed an automatic parallel corpus generation system prototype, which creates Hindi-English parallel corpus for news translation task. Further to verify the quality of generated parallel corpus we have experimented by taking various performance metrics and the r…
Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）；Osaka University（大阪大学）
Sentence representations can capture a wide range of information that cannot be captured by local features based on character or word N-grams. This paper examines the usefulness of universal sentence representations for evaluating the quality of machine translation. Although it is difficult to train sentence representations using small-scale translation datasets with manual evaluation, sentence representations trained from large-scale data in other tasks can improve the automatic evaluation of machine translation. Experimental results of the WMT-2016 dataset show that the proposed method achie…
Automatic metrics are fundamental for the development and evaluation of machine translation systems. Judging whether, and to what extent, automatic metrics concur with the gold standard of human evaluation is not a straightforward problem. We show that current methods for judging metrics are highly sensitive to the translations used for assessment, particularly the presence of outliers, which often leads to falsely confident conclusions about a metric's efficacy. Finally, we turn to pairwise system ranking, developing a method for thresholding performance improvement under an automatic metric …
For the past 60 years, Research in machine translation is going on. For the development in this field, a lot of new techniques are being developed each day. As a result, we have witnessed development of many automatic machine translators. A manager of machine translation development project needs to know the performance increase/decrease, after changes have been done in his system. Due to this reason, a need for evaluation of machine translation systems was felt. In this article, we shall present the evaluation of some machine translators. This evaluation will be done by a human evaluator and …
With the fast development of Machine Translation (MT) systems, especially the new boost from Neural MT (NMT) models, the MT output quality has reached a new level of accuracy. However, many researchers criticised that the current popular evaluation metrics such as BLEU can not correctly distinguish the state-of-the-art NMT systems regarding quality differences. In this short paper, we describe the design and implementation of a linguistically motivated human-in-the-loop evaluation metric looking into idiomatic and terminological Multi-word Expressions (MWEs). MWEs have played a bottleneck in m…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
Mined bitexts can contain imperfect translations that yield unreliable training signals for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). While filtering such pairs out is known to improve final model quality, we argue that it is suboptimal in low-resource conditions where even mined data can be limited. In our work, we propose instead, to refine the mined bitexts via automatic editing: given a sentence in a language xf, and a possibly imperfect translation of it xe, our model generates a revised version xf' or xe' that yields a more equivalent translation pair (i.e., <xf, xe'> or <xf', xe>). We use a sim…
We introduce the task of isochrony-aware machine translation which aims at generating translations suitable for dubbing. Dubbing of a spoken sentence requires transferring the content as well as the speech-pause structure of the source into the target language to achieve audiovisual coherence. Practically, this implies correctly projecting pauses from the source to the target and ensuring that target speech segments have roughly the same duration of the corresponding source speech segments. In this work, we propose implicit and explicit modeling approaches to integrate isochrony information in…
Black-box machine translation systems have proven incredibly useful for a variety of applications yet by design are hard to adapt, tune to a specific domain, or build on top of. In this work, we introduce a method to improve such systems via automatic pre-processing (APP) using sentence simplification. We first propose a method to automatically generate a large in-domain paraphrase corpus through back-translation with a black-box MT system, which is used to train a paraphrase model that "simplifies" the original sentence to be more conducive for translation. The model is used to preprocess sou…
A common bottleneck for developing machine translation (MT) systems for some language pairs is the lack of direct parallel translation data sets, in general and in certain domains. Alternative solutions such as zero-shot models or pivoting techniques are successful in getting a strong baseline, but are often below the more supported language-pair systems. In this paper, we focus on Arabic-Japanese machine translation, a less studied language pair; and we work with a unique parallel corpus of Arabic news articles that were manually translated to Japanese. We use this parallel corpus to adapt a …
DITING: A Multi-Agent Evaluation Framework for Benchmarking Web Novel Translation
School of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University（武汉大学人工智能学院）；Center for Language and Information Research, Wuhan University（武汉大学语言信息研究中心）；Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学）；The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Yunnan Trrans Technology Co., Ltd.（云南翻译技术有限公司）；Malvern College Chengdu（成都马尔伯学院）
Machine translation has made rapid advances in recent years. Millions of people are using it today in online translation systems and mobile applications in order to communicate across language barriers. The question naturally arises whether such systems can approach or achieve parity with human translations. In this paper, we first address the problem of how to define and accurately measure human parity in translation. We then describe Microsoft's machine translation system and measure the quality of its translations on the widely used WMT 2017 news translation task from Chinese to English. We…
Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）；Huawei Technologies（华为技术）
In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to automatically construct parallel discourse corpus for dialogue machine translation. Firstly, the parallel subtitle data and its corresponding monolingual movie script data are crawled and collected from Internet. Then tags such as speaker and discourse boundary from the script data are projected to its subtitle data via an information retrieval approach in order to map monolingual discourse to bilingual texts. We not only evaluate the mapping results, but also integrate speaker information into the translation. Experiments show our proposed method…
ADAPT Centre（ADAPT中心）；Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）
This work presents a novel approach to Automatic Post-Editing (APE) and Word-Level Quality Estimation (QE) using ensembles of specialized Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems. Word-level features that have proven effective for QE are included as input factors, expanding the representation of the original source and the machine translation hypothesis, which are used to generate an automatically post-edited hypothesis. We train a suite of NMT models that use different input representations, but share the same output space. These models are then ensembled together, and tuned for both the APE …
Machine translation (MT) systems, especially when designed for an industrial setting, are trained with general parallel data derived from the Web. Thus, their style is typically driven by word/structure distribution coming from the average of many domains. In contrast, MT customers want translations to be specialized to their domain, for which they are typically able to provide text samples. We describe an approach for customizing MT systems on specific domains by selecting data similar to the target customer data to train neural translation models. We build document classifiers using monoling…
