Human Evaluation of Multi-modal Neural Machine Translation: A Case-Study on E-Commerce Listing Titles

Iacer Calixto, Daniel Stein, Evgeny Matusov, Sheila Castilho, Andy Way

Abstract
In this paper, we study how humans perceive the use of images as an additional knowledge source to machine-translate user-generated product listings in an e-commerce company. We conduct a human evaluation where we assess how a multi-modal neural machine translation (NMT) model compares to two text-only approaches: a conventional state-of-the-art attention-based NMT and a phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) model. We evaluate translations obtained with different systems and also discuss the data set of user-generated product listings, which in our case comprises both product listings and associated images. We found that humans preferred translations obtained with a PBSMT system to both text-only and multi-modal NMT over 56% of the time. Nonetheless, human evaluators ranked translations from a multi-modal NMT model as better than those of a text-only NMT over 88% of the time, which suggests that images do help NMT in this use-case.
Anthology ID:
W17-2004
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Vision and Language
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Anya Belz, Erkut Erdem, Katerina Pastra, Krystian Mikolajczyk
Venue:
VL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
31–37
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2004
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-2004
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Iacer Calixto, Daniel Stein, Evgeny Matusov, Sheila Castilho, and Andy Way. 2017. Human Evaluation of Multi-modal Neural Machine Translation: A Case-Study on E-Commerce Listing Titles. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Vision and Language, pages 31–37, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Human Evaluation of Multi-modal Neural Machine Translation: A Case-Study on E-Commerce Listing Titles (Calixto et al., VL 2017)
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