MTNT: A Testbed for Machine Translation of Noisy Text

Paul Michel, Graham Neubig


Abstract
Noisy or non-standard input text can cause disastrous mistranslations in most modern Machine Translation (MT) systems, and there has been growing research interest in creating noise-robust MT systems. However, as of yet there are no publicly available parallel corpora of with naturally occurring noisy inputs and translations, and thus previous work has resorted to evaluating on synthetically created datasets. In this paper, we propose a benchmark dataset for Machine Translation of Noisy Text (MTNT), consisting of noisy comments on Reddit (www.reddit.com) and professionally sourced translations. We commissioned translations of English comments into French and Japanese, as well as French and Japanese comments into English, on the order of 7k-37k sentences per language pair. We qualitatively and quantitatively examine the types of noise included in this dataset, then demonstrate that existing MT models fail badly on a number of noise-related phenomena, even after performing adaptation on a small training set of in-domain data. This indicates that this dataset can provide an attractive testbed for methods tailored to handling noisy text in MT.
Anthology ID:
D18-1050
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
543–553
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1050
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1050
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Paul Michel and Graham Neubig. 2018. MTNT: A Testbed for Machine Translation of Noisy Text. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 543–553, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MTNT: A Testbed for Machine Translation of Noisy Text (Michel & Neubig, EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/D18-1050.pdf
Code
 pmichel31415/mtnt +  additional community code
Data
MTNTJESC