Towards Modeling the Style of Translators in Neural Machine Translation

Yue Wang, Cuong Hoang, Marcello Federico


Abstract
One key ingredient of neural machine translation is the use of large datasets from different domains and resources (e.g. Europarl, TED talks). These datasets contain documents translated by professional translators using different but consistent translation styles. Despite that, the model is usually trained in a way that neither explicitly captures the variety of translation styles present in the data nor translates new data in different and controllable styles. In this work, we investigate methods to augment the state of the art Transformer model with translator information that is available in part of the training data. We show that our style-augmented translation models are able to capture the style variations of translators and to generate translations with different styles on new data. Indeed, the generated variations differ significantly, up to +4.5 BLEU score difference. Despite that, human evaluation confirms that the translations are of the same quality.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.94
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1193–1199
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.94
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.94
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yue Wang, Cuong Hoang, and Marcello Federico. 2021. Towards Modeling the Style of Translators in Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 1193–1199, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Modeling the Style of Translators in Neural Machine Translation (Wang et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.94.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.94.mp4