A Pronoun Test Suite Evaluation of the English–German MT Systems at WMT 2018

Liane Guillou, Christian Hardmeier, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Sharid Loáiciga

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Abstract
We evaluate the output of 16 English-to-German MT systems with respect to the translation of pronouns in the context of the WMT 2018 competition. We work with a test suite specifically designed to assess system quality in various fine-grained categories known to be problematic. The main evaluation scores come from a semi-automatic process, combining automatic reference matching with extensive manual annotation of uncertain cases. We find that current NMT systems are good at translating pronouns with intra-sentential reference, but the inter-sentential cases remain difficult. NMT systems are also good at the translation of event pronouns, unlike systems from the phrase-based SMT paradigm. No single system performs best at translating all types of anaphoric pronouns, suggesting unexplained random effects influencing the translation of pronouns with NMT.
Anthology ID:
W18-6435
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers
Month:
October
Year:
2018
Address:
Belgium, Brussels
Editors:
Ondřej Bojar, Rajen Chatterjee, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Yvette Graham, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz, Matteo Negri, Aurélie Névéol, Mariana Neves, Matt Post, Lucia Specia, Marco Turchi, Karin Verspoor
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
570–577
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-6435
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-6435
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liane Guillou, Christian Hardmeier, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, and Sharid Loáiciga. 2018. A Pronoun Test Suite Evaluation of the English–German MT Systems at WMT 2018. In Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers, pages 570–577, Belgium, Brussels. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Pronoun Test Suite Evaluation of the English–German MT Systems at WMT 2018 (Guillou et al., WMT 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/teach-a-man-to-fish/W18-6435.pdf
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