Morphological and Semantic Evaluation of Ancient Chinese Machine Translation

Kai Jin, Dan Zhao, Wuying Liu


Abstract
Machine translation (MT) of ancient Chinese texts presents unique challenges due to the complex grammatical structures, cultural nuances, and polysemy of the language. This paper focuses on evaluating the translation quality of different platforms for ancient Chinese texts using The Analects as a case study. The evaluation is conducted using the BLEU, LMS, and ESS metrics, and the platforms compared include three machine translation platforms (Baidu Translate, Bing Microsoft Translator, and DeepL), and one language generation model ChatGPT that can engage in translation endeavors. Results show that Baidu performs the best, surpassing the other platforms in all three metrics, while ChatGPT ranks second and demonstrates unique advantages. The translations generated by ChatGPT are deemed highly valuable as references. The study contributes to understanding the challenges of MT for ancient Chinese texts and provides insights for users and researchers in this field. It also highlights the importance of considering specific domain requirements when evaluating MT systems.
Anthology ID:
2023.alp-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ancient Language Processing Workshop
Month:
September
Year:
2023
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Adam Anderson, Shai Gordin, Bin Li, Yudong Liu, Marco C. Passarotti
Venues:
ALP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
96–102
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.alp-1.11
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kai Jin, Dan Zhao, and Wuying Liu. 2023. Morphological and Semantic Evaluation of Ancient Chinese Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Ancient Language Processing Workshop, pages 96–102, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
Morphological and Semantic Evaluation of Ancient Chinese Machine Translation (Jin et al., ALP-WS 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.alp-1.11.pdf