Findings of the First Shared Task on Machine Translation Robustness
Xian Li, Paul Michel, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Yonatan Belinkov, Nadir Durrani, Orhan Firat, Philipp Koehn, Graham Neubig, Juan Pino, Hassan Sajjad
Abstract
We share the findings of the first shared task on improving robustness of Machine Translation (MT). The task provides a testbed representing challenges facing MT models deployed in the real world, and facilitates new approaches to improve models’ robustness to noisy input and domain mismatch. We focus on two language pairs (English-French and English-Japanese), and the submitted systems are evaluated on a blind test set consisting of noisy comments on Reddit and professionally sourced translations. As a new task, we received 23 submissions by 11 participating teams from universities, companies, national labs, etc. All submitted systems achieved large improvements over baselines, with the best improvement having +22.33 BLEU. We evaluated submissions by both human judgment and automatic evaluation (BLEU), which shows high correlations (Pearson’s r = 0.94 and 0.95). Furthermore, we conducted a qualitative analysis of the submitted systems using compare-mt, which revealed their salient differences in handling challenges in this task. Such analysis provides additional insights when there is occasional disagreement between human judgment and BLEU, e.g. systems better at producing colloquial expressions received higher score from human judgment.- Anthology ID:
- W19-5303
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Florence, Italy
- Editors:
- Ondřej Bojar, Rajen Chatterjee, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Yvette Graham, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, André Martins, Christof Monz, Matteo Negri, Aurélie Névéol, Mariana Neves, Matt Post, Marco Turchi, Karin Verspoor
- Venue:
- WMT
- SIG:
- SIGMT
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 91–102
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W19-5303
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W19-5303
- Cite (ACL):
- Xian Li, Paul Michel, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Yonatan Belinkov, Nadir Durrani, Orhan Firat, Philipp Koehn, Graham Neubig, Juan Pino, and Hassan Sajjad. 2019. Findings of the First Shared Task on Machine Translation Robustness. In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1), pages 91–102, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Findings of the First Shared Task on Machine Translation Robustness (Li et al., WMT 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/W19-5303.pdf
- Code
- neulab/compare-mt
- Data
- MTNT