Ce travail présente deux séries d’expériences visant à identifier les flux d’information dans les systèmes de traduction neuronaux. La première série s’appuie sur une comparaison des décisions d’un modèle de langue et d’un modèle de traduction pour mettre en évidence le flux d’information provenant de la source. La seconde série met en évidence l’impact de ces flux sur l’apprentissage du système dans le cas particulier du transfert de l’information de genre.

This paper aims at identifying the information flow in state-of-the-art machine translation systems, taking as example the transfer of gender when translating from French into English. Using a controlled set of examples, we experiment several ways to investigate how gender information circulates in a encoder-decoder architecture considering both probing techniques as well as interventions on the internal representations used in the MT system. Our results show that gender information can be found in all token representations built by the encoder and the decoder and lead us to conclude that there are multiple pathways for gender transfer.

This paper discusses the WMT 2021 terminology shared task from a “meta” perspective. We present the results of our experiments using the terminology dataset and the OpenNMT (Klein et al., 2017) and JoeyNMT (Kreutzer et al., 2019) toolkits for the language direction English to French. Our experiment 1 compares the predictions of the two toolkits. Experiment 2 uses OpenNMT to fine-tune the model. We report our results for the task with the evaluation script but mostly discuss the linguistic properties of the terminology dataset provided for the task. We provide evidence of the importance of text genres across scores, having replicated the evaluation scripts.