“Hi, how can I help you?” Improving Machine Translation of Conversational Content in a Business Context

Bianka Buschbeck, Jennifer Mell, Miriam Exel, Matthias Huck


Abstract
This paper addresses the automatic translation of conversational content in a business context, for example support chat dialogues. While such use cases share characteristics with other informal machine translation scenarios, translation requirements with respect to technical and business-related expressions are high. To succeed in such scenarios, we experimented with curating dedicated training and test data, injecting noise to improve robustness, and applying sentence weighting schemes to carefully manage the influence of the different corpora. We show that our approach improves the performance of our models on conversational content for all 18 investigated language pairs while preserving translation quality on other domains - an indispensable requirement to integrate these developments into our MT engines at SAP.
Anthology ID:
2022.eamt-1.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Ghent, Belgium
Editors:
Helena Moniz, Lieve Macken, Andrew Rufener, Loïc Barrault, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christophe Declercq, Maarit Koponen, Ellie Kemp, Spyridon Pilos, Mikel L. Forcada, Carolina Scarton, Joachim Van den Bogaert, Joke Daems, Arda Tezcan, Bram Vanroy, Margot Fonteyne
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
191–200
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.eamt-1.22
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bianka Buschbeck, Jennifer Mell, Miriam Exel, and Matthias Huck. 2022. “Hi, how can I help you?” Improving Machine Translation of Conversational Content in a Business Context. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pages 191–200, Ghent, Belgium. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
“Hi, how can I help you?” Improving Machine Translation of Conversational Content in a Business Context (Buschbeck et al., EAMT 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.eamt-1.22.pdf