A Challenge Set Approach to Evaluating Machine Translation

Pierre Isabelle, Colin Cherry, George Foster


Abstract
Neural machine translation represents an exciting leap forward in translation quality. But what longstanding weaknesses does it resolve, and which remain? We address these questions with a challenge set approach to translation evaluation and error analysis. A challenge set consists of a small set of sentences, each hand-designed to probe a system’s capacity to bridge a particular structural divergence between languages. To exemplify this approach, we present an English-French challenge set, and use it to analyze phrase-based and neural systems. The resulting analysis provides not only a more fine-grained picture of the strengths of neural systems, but also insight into which linguistic phenomena remain out of reach.
Anthology ID:
D17-1263
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:
2486–2496
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1263
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1263
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pierre Isabelle, Colin Cherry, and George Foster. 2017. A Challenge Set Approach to Evaluating Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2486–2496, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Challenge Set Approach to Evaluating Machine Translation (Isabelle et al., EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/D17-1263.pdf
Attachment:
 D17-1263.Attachment.zip
Data
WMT 2016