Human or Neural Translation?

Shivendra Bhardwaj, David Alfonso Hermelo, Phillippe Langlais, Gabriel Bernier-Colborne, Cyril Goutte, Michel Simard


Abstract
Deep neural models tremendously improved machine translation. In this context, we investigate whether distinguishing machine from human translations is still feasible. We trained and applied 18 classifiers under two settings: a monolingual task, in which the classifier only looks at the translation; and a bilingual task, in which the source text is also taken into consideration. We report on extensive experiments involving 4 neural MT systems (Google Translate, DeepL, as well as two systems we trained) and varying the domain of texts. We show that the bilingual task is the easiest one and that transfer-based deep-learning classifiers perform best, with mean accuracies around 85% in-domain and 75% out-of-domain .
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.576
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6553–6564
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.576
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.576
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shivendra Bhardwaj, David Alfonso Hermelo, Phillippe Langlais, Gabriel Bernier-Colborne, Cyril Goutte, and Michel Simard. 2020. Human or Neural Translation?. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6553–6564, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Human or Neural Translation? (Bhardwaj et al., COLING 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2020.coling-main.576.pdf