Context-aware and gender-neutral Translation Memories
Marjolene Paulo, Vera Cabarrão, Helena Moniz, Miguel Menezes, Rachel Grewcock, Eduardo Farah
Abstract
This work proposes an approach to use Part-Of-Speech (POS) information to automatically detect context-dependent Translation Units (TUs) from a Translation Memory database pertaining to the customer support domain. In line with our goal to minimize context-dependency in TUs, we show how this mechanism can be deployed to create new gender-neutral and context-independent TUs. Our experiments, conducted across Portuguese (PT), Brazilian Portuguese (PT-BR), Spanish (ES), and Spanish-Latam (ES-LATAM), show that the occurrence of certain POS with specific words is accurate in identifying context dependency. In a cross-client analysis, we found that ~10% of the most frequent 13,200 TUs were context-dependent, with gender determining context-dependency in 98% of all confirmed cases. We used these findings to suggest gender-neutral equivalents for the most frequent TUs with gender constraints. Our approach is in use in the Unbabel translation pipeline, and can be integrated into any other Neural Machine Translation (NMT) pipeline.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.eamt-1.42
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Tampere, Finland
- Editors:
- Mary Nurminen, Judith Brenner, Maarit Koponen, Sirkku Latomaa, Mikhail Mikhailov, Frederike Schierl, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Eva Vanmassenhove, Sergi Alvarez Vidal, Nora Aranberri, Mara Nunziatini, Carla Parra Escartín, Mikel Forcada, Maja Popovic, Carolina Scarton, Helena Moniz
- Venue:
- EAMT
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Association for Machine Translation
- Note:
- Pages:
- 437–444
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.eamt-1.42
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Marjolene Paulo, Vera Cabarrão, Helena Moniz, Miguel Menezes, Rachel Grewcock, and Eduardo Farah. 2023. Context-aware and gender-neutral Translation Memories. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pages 437–444, Tampere, Finland. European Association for Machine Translation.
- Cite (Informal):
- Context-aware and gender-neutral Translation Memories (Paulo et al., EAMT 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2023.eamt-1.42.pdf