Glossary functionality in commercial machine translation: does it help? A first step to identify best practices for a language service provider

Randy Scansani, Loïc Dugast


Abstract
Recently, a number of commercial Machine Translation (MT) providers have started to offer glossary features allowing users to enforce terminology into the output of a generic model. However, to the best of our knowledge it is not clear how such features would impact terminology accuracy and the overall quality of the output. The present contribution aims at providing a first insight into the performance of the glossary-enhanced generic models offered by four providers. Our tests involve two different domains and language pairs, i.e. Sportswear En–Fr and Industrial Equipment De–En. The output of each generic model and of the glossaryenhanced one will be evaluated relying on Translation Error Rate (TER) to take into account the overall output quality and on accuracy to assess the compliance with the glossary. This is followed by a manual evaluation. The present contribution mainly focuses on understanding how these glossary features can be fruitfully exploited by language service providers (LSPs), especially in a scenario in which a customer glossary is already available and is added to the generic model as is.
Anthology ID:
2021.mtsummit-up.8
Volume:
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVIII: Users and Providers Track
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Virtual
Editors:
Janice Campbell, Ben Huyck, Stephen Larocca, Jay Marciano, Konstantin Savenkov, Alex Yanishevsky
Venue:
MTSummit
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Note:
Pages:
78–88
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.mtsummit-up.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Randy Scansani and Loïc Dugast. 2021. Glossary functionality in commercial machine translation: does it help? A first step to identify best practices for a language service provider. In Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVIII: Users and Providers Track, pages 78–88, Virtual. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
Glossary functionality in commercial machine translation: does it help? A first step to identify best practices for a language service provider (Scansani & Dugast, MTSummit 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.mtsummit-up.8.pdf