@inproceedings{libovicky-etal-2022-dont,
title = "Why don`t people use character-level machine translation?",
author = "Libovick{\'y}, Jind{\v{r}}ich and
Schmid, Helmut and
Fraser, Alexander",
editor = "Muresan, Smaranda and
Nakov, Preslav and
Villavicencio, Aline",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022",
month = may,
year = "2022",
address = "Dublin, Ireland",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.194/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.findings-acl.194",
pages = "2470--2485",
abstract = "We present a literature and empirical survey that critically assesses the state of the art in character-level modeling for machine translation (MT). Despite evidence in the literature that character-level systems are comparable with subword systems, they are virtually never used in competitive setups in WMT competitions. We empirically show that even with recent modeling innovations in character-level natural language processing, character-level MT systems still struggle to match their subword-based counterparts. Character-level MT systems show neither better domain robustness, nor better morphological generalization, despite being often so motivated. However, we are able to show robustness towards source side noise and that translation quality does not degrade with increasing beam size at decoding time."
}
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Why don‘t people use character-level machine translation?
%A Libovický, Jindřich
%A Schmid, Helmut
%A Fraser, Alexander
%Y Muresan, Smaranda
%Y Nakov, Preslav
%Y Villavicencio, Aline
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022
%D 2022
%8 May
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Dublin, Ireland
%F libovicky-etal-2022-dont
%X We present a literature and empirical survey that critically assesses the state of the art in character-level modeling for machine translation (MT). Despite evidence in the literature that character-level systems are comparable with subword systems, they are virtually never used in competitive setups in WMT competitions. We empirically show that even with recent modeling innovations in character-level natural language processing, character-level MT systems still struggle to match their subword-based counterparts. Character-level MT systems show neither better domain robustness, nor better morphological generalization, despite being often so motivated. However, we are able to show robustness towards source side noise and that translation quality does not degrade with increasing beam size at decoding time.
%R 10.18653/v1/2022.findings-acl.194
%U https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.194/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.findings-acl.194
%P 2470-2485
Markdown (Informal)
[Why don’t people use character-level machine translation?](https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.194/) (Libovický et al., Findings 2022)
ACL