When a Good Translation is Wrong in Context: Context-Aware Machine Translation Improves on Deixis, Ellipsis, and Lexical Cohesion

Elena Voita, Rico Sennrich, Ivan Titov


Abstract
Though machine translation errors caused by the lack of context beyond one sentence have long been acknowledged, the development of context-aware NMT systems is hampered by several problems. Firstly, standard metrics are not sensitive to improvements in consistency in document-level translations. Secondly, previous work on context-aware NMT assumed that the sentence-aligned parallel data consisted of complete documents while in most practical scenarios such document-level data constitutes only a fraction of the available parallel data. To address the first issue, we perform a human study on an English-Russian subtitles dataset and identify deixis, ellipsis and lexical cohesion as three main sources of inconsistency. We then create test sets targeting these phenomena. To address the second shortcoming, we consider a set-up in which a much larger amount of sentence-level data is available compared to that aligned at the document level. We introduce a model that is suitable for this scenario and demonstrate major gains over a context-agnostic baseline on our new benchmarks without sacrificing performance as measured with BLEU.
Anthology ID:
P19-1116
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1198–1212
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1116
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1116
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elena Voita, Rico Sennrich, and Ivan Titov. 2019. When a Good Translation is Wrong in Context: Context-Aware Machine Translation Improves on Deixis, Ellipsis, and Lexical Cohesion. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1198–1212, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
When a Good Translation is Wrong in Context: Context-Aware Machine Translation Improves on Deixis, Ellipsis, and Lexical Cohesion (Voita et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1116.pdf
Code
 lena-voita/good-translation-wrong-in-context