What Works When in Context-aware Neural Machine Translation?

Harritxu Gete, Thierry Etchegoyhen, Gorka Labaka


Abstract
Document-level Machine Translation has emerged as a promising means to enhance automated translation quality, but it is currently unclear how effectively context-aware models use the available context during translation. This paper aims to provide insight into the current state of models based on input concatenation, with an in-depth evaluation on English–German and English–French standard datasets. We notably evaluate the impact of data bias, antecedent part-of-speech, context complexity, and the syntactic function of the elements involved in discursive phenomena. Our experimental results indicate that the selected models do improve the overall translation in context, with varying sensitivity to the different factors we examined. We notably show that the selected context-aware models operate markedly better on regular syntactic configurations involving subject antecedents and pronouns, with degraded performance as the configurations become more dissimilar.
Anthology ID:
2023.eamt-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation
Month:
June
Year:
2023
Address:
Tampere, Finland
Editors:
Mary Nurminen, Judith Brenner, Maarit Koponen, Sirkku Latomaa, Mikhail Mikhailov, Frederike Schierl, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Eva Vanmassenhove, Sergi Alvarez Vidal, Nora Aranberri, Mara Nunziatini, Carla Parra Escartín, Mikel Forcada, Maja Popovic, Carolina Scarton, Helena Moniz
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
147–156
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eamt-1.15
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Harritxu Gete, Thierry Etchegoyhen, and Gorka Labaka. 2023. What Works When in Context-aware Neural Machine Translation?. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pages 147–156, Tampere, Finland. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
What Works When in Context-aware Neural Machine Translation? (Gete et al., EAMT 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eamt-1.15.pdf