Lost in Translation: Analysis of Information Loss During Machine Translation Between Polysynthetic and Fusional Languages

Manuel Mager, Elisabeth Mager, Alfonso Medina-Urrea, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz, Katharina Kann

Abstract
Machine translation from polysynthetic to fusional languages is a challenging task, which gets further complicated by the limited amount of parallel text available. Thus, translation performance is far from the state of the art for high-resource and more intensively studied language pairs. To shed light on the phenomena which hamper automatic translation to and from polysynthetic languages, we study translations from three low-resource, polysynthetic languages (Nahuatl, Wixarika and Yorem Nokki) into Spanish and vice versa. Doing so, we find that in a morpheme-to-morpheme alignment an important amount of information contained in polysynthetic morphemes has no Spanish counterpart, and its translation is often omitted. We further conduct a qualitative analysis and, thus, identify morpheme types that are commonly hard to align or ignored in the translation process.
Anthology ID:
W18-4808
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Modeling of Polysynthetic Languages
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editor:
Judith L. Klavans
Venue:
PYLO
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
73–83
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4808
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Manuel Mager, Elisabeth Mager, Alfonso Medina-Urrea, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz, and Katharina Kann. 2018. Lost in Translation: Analysis of Information Loss During Machine Translation Between Polysynthetic and Fusional Languages. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Modeling of Polysynthetic Languages, pages 73–83, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Lost in Translation: Analysis of Information Loss During Machine Translation Between Polysynthetic and Fusional Languages (Mager et al., PYLO 2018)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-dup-bibkey/W18-4808.pdf
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