PROSE: A Pronoun Omission Solution for Chinese-English Spoken Language Translation

Ke Wang, Xiutian Zhao, Yanghui Li, Wei Peng


Abstract
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems encounter a significant challenge when translating a pro-drop (‘pronoun-dropping’) language (e.g., Chinese) to a non-pro-drop one (e.g., English), since the pro-drop phenomenon demands NMT systems to recover omitted pronouns. This unique and crucial task, however, lacks sufficient datasets for benchmarking. To bridge this gap, we introduce PROSE, a new benchmark featured in diverse pro-drop instances for document-level Chinese-English spoken language translation. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth investigation of the pro-drop phenomenon in spoken Chinese on this dataset, reconfirming that pro-drop reduces the performance of NMT systems in Chinese-English translation. To alleviate the negative impact introduced by pro-drop, we propose Mention-Aware Semantic Augmentation, a novel approach that leverages the semantic embedding of dropped pronouns to augment training pairs. Results from the experiments on four Chinese-English translation corpora show that our proposed method outperforms existing methods regarding omitted pronoun retrieval and overall translation quality.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.141
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2297–2311
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.141
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.141
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ke Wang, Xiutian Zhao, Yanghui Li, and Wei Peng. 2023. PROSE: A Pronoun Omission Solution for Chinese-English Spoken Language Translation. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2297–2311, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PROSE: A Pronoun Omission Solution for Chinese-English Spoken Language Translation (Wang et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.141.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.141.mp4