Is “moby dick” a Whale or a Bird? Named Entities and Terminology in Speech Translation

Marco Gaido, Susana Rodríguez, Matteo Negri, Luisa Bentivogli, Marco Turchi


Abstract
Automatic translation systems are known to struggle with rare words. Among these, named entities (NEs) and domain-specific terms are crucial, since errors in their translation can lead to severe meaning distortions. Despite their importance, previous speech translation (ST) studies have neglected them, also due to the dearth of publicly available resources tailored to their specific evaluation. To fill this gap, we i) present the first systematic analysis of the behavior of state-of-the-art ST systems in translating NEs and terminology, and ii) release NEuRoparl-ST, a novel benchmark built from European Parliament speeches annotated with NEs and terminology. Our experiments on the three language directions covered by our benchmark (en→es/fr/it) show that ST systems correctly translate 75–80% of terms and 65–70% of NEs, with very low performance (37–40%) on person names.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.128
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1707–1716
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.128
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.128
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marco Gaido, Susana Rodríguez, Matteo Negri, Luisa Bentivogli, and Marco Turchi. 2021. Is “moby dick” a Whale or a Bird? Named Entities and Terminology in Speech Translation. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1707–1716, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Is “moby dick” a Whale or a Bird? Named Entities and Terminology in Speech Translation (Gaido et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.emnlp-main.128.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.emnlp-main.128.mp4
Data
Europarl-ST