Document-Level Machine Translation with Large-Scale Public Parallel Corpora

Proyag Pal, Alexandra Birch, Kenneth Heafield


Abstract
Despite the fact that document-level machine translation has inherent advantages over sentence-level machine translation due to additional information available to a model from document context, most translation systems continue to operate at a sentence level. This is primarily due to the severe lack of publicly available large-scale parallel corpora at the document level. We release a large-scale open parallel corpus with document context extracted from ParaCrawl in five language pairs, along with code to compile document-level datasets for any language pair supported by ParaCrawl. We train context-aware models on these datasets and find improvements in terms of overall translation quality and targeted document-level phenomena. We also analyse how much long-range information is useful to model some of these discourse phenomena and find models are able to utilise context from several preceding sentences.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.712
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13185–13197
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.712
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Proyag Pal, Alexandra Birch, and Kenneth Heafield. 2024. Document-Level Machine Translation with Large-Scale Public Parallel Corpora. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 13185–13197, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Document-Level Machine Translation with Large-Scale Public Parallel Corpora (Pal et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.712.pdf