Consistent Translation of Repeated Nouns using Syntactic and Semantic Cues

Xiao Pu, Laura Mascarell, Andrei Popescu-Belis


Abstract
We propose a method to decide whether two occurrences of the same noun in a source text should be translated consistently, i.e. using the same noun in the target text as well. We train and test classifiers that predict consistent translations based on lexical, syntactic, and semantic features. We first evaluate the accuracy of our classifiers intrinsically, in terms of the accuracy of consistency predictions, over a subset of the UN Corpus. Then, we also evaluate them in combination with phrase-based statistical MT systems for Chinese-to-English and German-to-English. We compare the automatic post-editing of noun translations with the re-ranking of the translation hypotheses based on the classifiers’ output, and also use these methods in combination. This improves over the baseline and closes up to 50% of the gap in BLEU scores between the baseline and an oracle classifier.
Anthology ID:
E17-1089
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Mirella Lapata, Phil Blunsom, Alexander Koller
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
948–957
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-1089
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiao Pu, Laura Mascarell, and Andrei Popescu-Belis. 2017. Consistent Translation of Repeated Nouns using Syntactic and Semantic Cues. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers, pages 948–957, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Consistent Translation of Repeated Nouns using Syntactic and Semantic Cues (Pu et al., EACL 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-1089.pdf