An Error-based Investigation of Statistical and Neural Machine Translation Performance on Hindi-to-Tamil and English-to-Tamil
Akshai Ramesh, Venkatesh Balavadhani Parthasa, Rejwanul Haque, Andy Way
Abstract
Statistical machine translation (SMT) was the state-of-the-art in machine translation (MT) research for more than two decades, but has since been superseded by neural MT (NMT). Despite producing state-of-the-art results in many translation tasks, neural models underperform in resource-poor scenarios. Despite some success, none of the present-day benchmarks that have tried to overcome this problem can be regarded as a universal solution to the problem of translation of many low-resource languages. In this work, we investigate the performance of phrase-based SMT (PB-SMT) and NMT on two rarely-tested low-resource language-pairs, English-to-Tamil and Hindi-to-Tamil, taking a specialised data domain (software localisation) into consideration. This paper demonstrates our findings including the identification of several issues of the current neural approaches to low-resource domain-specific text translation.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.wat-1.22
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Asian Translation
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Suzhou, China
- Editors:
- Toshiaki Nakazawa, Hideki Nakayama, Chenchen Ding, Raj Dabre, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Win Pa Pa, Ondřej Bojar, Shantipriya Parida, Isao Goto, Hidaya Mino, Hiroshi Manabe, Katsuhito Sudoh, Sadao Kurohashi, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
- Venue:
- WAT
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 178–188
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.wat-1.22
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Akshai Ramesh, Venkatesh Balavadhani Parthasa, Rejwanul Haque, and Andy Way. 2020. An Error-based Investigation of Statistical and Neural Machine Translation Performance on Hindi-to-Tamil and English-to-Tamil. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Asian Translation, pages 178–188, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- An Error-based Investigation of Statistical and Neural Machine Translation Performance on Hindi-to-Tamil and English-to-Tamil (Ramesh et al., WAT 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2020.wat-1.22.pdf