Machine Translation, it’s a question of style, innit? The case of English tag questions

Rachel Bawden


Abstract
In this paper, we address the problem of generating English tag questions (TQs) (e.g. it is, isn’t it?) in Machine Translation (MT). We propose a post-edition solution, formulating the problem as a multi-class classification task. We present (i) the automatic annotation of English TQs in a parallel corpus of subtitles and (ii) an approach using a series of classifiers to predict TQ forms, which we use to post-edit state-of-the-art MT outputs. Our method provides significant improvements in English TQ translation when translating from Czech, French and German, in turn improving the fluidity, naturalness, grammatical correctness and pragmatic coherence of MT output.
Anthology ID:
D17-1265
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2507–2512
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1265
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1265
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rachel Bawden. 2017. Machine Translation, it’s a question of style, innit? The case of English tag questions. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2507–2512, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Machine Translation, it’s a question of style, innit? The case of English tag questions (Bawden, EMNLP 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/D17-1265.pdf