Abstract
Schema translation is the task of automatically translating headers of tabular data from one language to another. High-quality schema translation plays an important role in cross-lingual table searching, understanding and analysis. Despite its importance, schema translation is not well studied in the community, and state-of-the-art neural machine translation models cannot work well on this task because of two intrinsic differences between plain text and tabular data: morphological difference and context difference. To facilitate the research study, we construct the first parallel dataset for schema translation, which consists of 3,158 tables with 11,979 headers written in 6 different languages, including English, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. Also, we propose the first schema translation model called CAST, which is a header-to-header neural machine translation model augmented with schema context. Specifically, we model a target header and its context as a directed graph to represent their entity types and relations. Then CAST encodes the graph with a relational-aware transformer and uses another transformer to decode the header in the target language. Experiments on our dataset demonstrate that CAST significantly outperforms state-of-the-art neural machine translation models. Our dataset will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/ContextualSP.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.emnlp-main.5
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
- Editors:
- Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 56–66
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.5
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.5
- Cite (ACL):
- Kunrui Zhu, Yan Gao, Jiaqi Guo, and Jian-Guang Lou. 2021. Translating Headers of Tabular Data: A Pilot Study of Schema Translation. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 56–66, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Translating Headers of Tabular Data: A Pilot Study of Schema Translation (Zhu et al., EMNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2024-07/2021.emnlp-main.5.pdf
- Code
- microsoft/ContextualSP