Abstract
A neural multimodal machine translation (MMT) system is one that aims to perform better translation by extending conventional text-only translation models with multimodal information. Many recent studies report improvements when equipping their models with the multimodal module, despite the controversy of whether such improvements indeed come from the multimodal part. We revisit the contribution of multimodal information in MMT by devising two interpretable MMT models. To our surprise, although our models replicate similar gains as recently developed multimodal-integrated systems achieved, our models learn to ignore the multimodal information. Upon further investigation, we discover that the improvements achieved by the multimodal models over text-only counterparts are in fact results of the regularization effect. We report empirical findings that highlight the importance of MMT models’ interpretability, and discuss how our findings will benefit future research.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.acl-long.480
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
- Venues:
- ACL | IJCNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 6153–6166
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.480
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.480
- Cite (ACL):
- Zhiyong Wu, Lingpeng Kong, Wei Bi, Xiang Li, and Ben Kao. 2021. Good for Misconceived Reasons: An Empirical Revisiting on the Need for Visual Context in Multimodal Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6153–6166, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Good for Misconceived Reasons: An Empirical Revisiting on the Need for Visual Context in Multimodal Machine Translation (Wu et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2021.acl-long.480.pdf
- Data
- VATEX