Incorporating Multiword Expressions in Galician Neural Machine Translation: Compositionality, Efficiency, and Performance
Daniel Solla, Paula Pinto-Ferro, Laura Castro, Pablo Gamallo, Marcos Garcia
Abstract
This paper explores the behavior of neural machine translation models on two newly introduced datasets containing noun-adjective MWEs with different degrees of semantic ambiguity and compositionality. We compare general-domain machine translation systems with fine-tuned models exposed to small subsets of the target MWEs. By assessing the effects of the learning steps and corpus size, we found that carefully designed fine-tuned may improve MWE handling while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. However, our error analysis reveals that models still struggle in several scenarios, particularly when translating MWEs with idiomatic meanings. Both the datasets and the experiments focus on translation involving Galician, English, and Spanish.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.mwe-1.9
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2026)
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- Rabat, Marocco
- Editors:
- Atul Kr. Ojha, Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Mathieu Constant, Ivelina Stoyanova, A. Seza Doğruöz, Alexandre Rademaker
- Venues:
- MWE | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 75–85
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.mwe-1.9/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Daniel Solla, Paula Pinto-Ferro, Laura Castro, Pablo Gamallo, and Marcos Garcia. 2026. Incorporating Multiword Expressions in Galician Neural Machine Translation: Compositionality, Efficiency, and Performance. In Proceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2026), pages 75–85, Rabat, Marocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Incorporating Multiword Expressions in Galician Neural Machine Translation: Compositionality, Efficiency, and Performance (Solla et al., MWE 2026)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.mwe-1.9.pdf