Bridging Background Knowledge Gaps in Translation with Automatic Explicitation

HyoJung Han, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Marine Carpuat


Abstract
Translations help people understand content written in another language. However, even correct literal translations do not fulfill that goal when people lack the necessary background to understand them. Professional translators incorporate explicitations to explain the missing context by considering cultural differences between source and target audiences. Despite its potential to help users, NLP research on explicitation is limited because of the dearth of adequate evaluation methods. This work introduces techniques for automatically generating explicitations, motivated by WikiExpl: a dataset that we collect from Wikipedia and annotate with human translators. The resulting explicitations are useful as they help answer questions more accurately in a multilingual question answering framework.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.603
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9718–9735
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.603
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.603
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
HyoJung Han, Jordan Boyd-Graber, and Marine Carpuat. 2023. Bridging Background Knowledge Gaps in Translation with Automatic Explicitation. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9718–9735, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bridging Background Knowledge Gaps in Translation with Automatic Explicitation (Han et al., EMNLP 2023)
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