Towards Debiasing Translation Artifacts
Koel Dutta Chowdhury, Rricha Jalota, Cristina España-Bonet, Josef Genabith
Abstract
Cross-lingual natural language processing relies on translation, either by humans or machines, at different levels, from translating training data to translating test sets. However, compared to original texts in the same language, translations possess distinct qualities referred to as translationese. Previous research has shown that these translation artifacts influence the performance of a variety of cross-lingual tasks. In this work, we propose a novel approach to reducing translationese by extending an established bias-removal technique. We use the Iterative Null-space Projection (INLP) algorithm, and show by measuring classification accuracy before and after debiasing, that translationese is reduced at both sentence and word level. We evaluate the utility of debiasing translationese on a natural language inference (NLI) task, and show that by reducing this bias, NLI accuracy improves. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to debias translationese as represented in latent embedding space.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.naacl-main.292
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Seattle, United States
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3983–3991
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.292
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.292
- Cite (ACL):
- Koel Dutta Chowdhury, Rricha Jalota, Cristina España-Bonet, and Josef Genabith. 2022. Towards Debiasing Translation Artifacts. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3983–3991, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Towards Debiasing Translation Artifacts (Dutta Chowdhury et al., NAACL 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.naacl-main.292.pdf
- Code
- koeldc/towards-debiasing-translation-artifacts
- Data
- SNLI