Translation Error Detection as Rationale Extraction

Marina Fomicheva, Lucia Specia, Nikolaos Aletras


Abstract
Recent Quality Estimation (QE) models based on multilingual pre-trained representations have achieved very competitive results in predicting the overall quality of translated sentences. However, detecting specifically which translated words are incorrect is a more challenging task, especially when dealing with limited amounts of training data. We hypothesize that, not unlike humans, successful QE models rely on translation errors to predict overall sentence quality. By exploring a set of feature attribution methods that assign relevance scores to the inputs to explain model predictions, we study the behaviour of state-of-the-art sentence-level QE models and show that explanations (i.e. rationales) extracted from these models can indeed be used to detect translation errors. We therefore (i) introduce a novel semi-supervised method for word-level QE; and (ii) propose to use the QE task as a new benchmark for evaluating the plausibility of feature attribution, i.e. how interpretable model explanations are to humans.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-acl.327
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4148–4159
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.327
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-acl.327
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marina Fomicheva, Lucia Specia, and Nikolaos Aletras. 2022. Translation Error Detection as Rationale Extraction. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022, pages 4148–4159, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Translation Error Detection as Rationale Extraction (Fomicheva et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-2024-clasp/2022.findings-acl.327.pdf
Data
MLQE-PE