Diving Deep into Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation

Jingjing Huo, Christian Herold, Yingbo Gao, Leonard Dahlmann, Shahram Khadivi, Hermann Ney


Abstract
Context-aware neural machine translation (NMT) is a promising direction to improve the translation quality by making use of the additional context, e.g., document-level translation, or having meta-information. Although there exist various architectures and analyses, the effectiveness of different context-aware NMT models is not well explored yet. This paper analyzes the performance of document-level NMT models on four diverse domains with a varied amount of parallel document-level bilingual data. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments to investigate the impact of document-level NMT. We find that there is no single best approach to document-level NMT, but rather that different architectures come out on top on different tasks. Looking at task-specific problems, such as pronoun resolution or headline translation, we find improvements in the context-aware systems, even in cases where the corpus-level metrics like BLEU show no significant improvement. We also show that document-level back-translation significantly helps to compensate for the lack of document-level bi-texts.
Anthology ID:
2020.wmt-1.71
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Venues:
EMNLP | WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
604–616
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.wmt-1.71
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jingjing Huo, Christian Herold, Yingbo Gao, Leonard Dahlmann, Shahram Khadivi, and Hermann Ney. 2020. Diving Deep into Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 604–616, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Diving Deep into Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation (Huo et al., WMT 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/2020.wmt-1.71.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2020.wmt-1.71.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
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