A Pronoun Test Suite Evaluation of the English–German MT Systems at WMT 2018
Liane Guillou, Christian Hardmeier, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Sharid Loáiciga
Abstract
We evaluate the output of 16 English-to-German MT systems with respect to the translation of pronouns in the context of the WMT 2018 competition. We work with a test suite specifically designed to assess system quality in various fine-grained categories known to be problematic. The main evaluation scores come from a semi-automatic process, combining automatic reference matching with extensive manual annotation of uncertain cases. We find that current NMT systems are good at translating pronouns with intra-sentential reference, but the inter-sentential cases remain difficult. NMT systems are also good at the translation of event pronouns, unlike systems from the phrase-based SMT paradigm. No single system performs best at translating all types of anaphoric pronouns, suggesting unexplained random effects influencing the translation of pronouns with NMT.- Anthology ID:
- W18-6435
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers
- Month:
- October
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- Belgium, Brussels
- Venue:
- WMT
- SIG:
- SIGMT
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 570–577
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W18-6435
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W18-6435
- Cite (ACL):
- Liane Guillou, Christian Hardmeier, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, and Sharid Loáiciga. 2018. A Pronoun Test Suite Evaluation of the English–German MT Systems at WMT 2018. In Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers, pages 570–577, Belgium, Brussels. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Pronoun Test Suite Evaluation of the English–German MT Systems at WMT 2018 (Guillou et al., WMT 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-url/W18-6435.pdf
- Data
- ParCorFull