Diving Deep into Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation

Jingjing Huo, Christian Herold, Yingbo Gao, Leonard Dahlmann, Shahram Khadivi, Hermann Ney


Abstract
Context-aware neural machine translation (NMT) is a promising direction to improve the translation quality by making use of the additional context, e.g., document-level translation, or having meta-information. Although there exist various architectures and analyses, the effectiveness of different context-aware NMT models is not well explored yet. This paper analyzes the performance of document-level NMT models on four diverse domains with a varied amount of parallel document-level bilingual data. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments to investigate the impact of document-level NMT. We find that there is no single best approach to document-level NMT, but rather that different architectures come out on top on different tasks. Looking at task-specific problems, such as pronoun resolution or headline translation, we find improvements in the context-aware systems, even in cases where the corpus-level metrics like BLEU show no significant improvement. We also show that document-level back-translation significantly helps to compensate for the lack of document-level bi-texts.
Anthology ID:
2020.wmt-1.71
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Loïc Barrault, Ondřej Bojar, Fethi Bougares, Rajen Chatterjee, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Alexander Fraser, Yvette Graham, Paco Guzman, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, André Martins, Makoto Morishita, Christof Monz, Masaaki Nagata, Toshiaki Nakazawa, Matteo Negri
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
604–616
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.wmt-1.71
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jingjing Huo, Christian Herold, Yingbo Gao, Leonard Dahlmann, Shahram Khadivi, and Hermann Ney. 2020. Diving Deep into Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 604–616, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Diving Deep into Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation (Huo et al., WMT 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2020.wmt-1.71.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2020.wmt-1.71.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939585
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