How Grammatical is Character-level Neural Machine Translation? Assessing MT Quality with Contrastive Translation Pairs

Rico Sennrich


Abstract
Analysing translation quality in regards to specific linguistic phenomena has historically been difficult and time-consuming. Neural machine translation has the attractive property that it can produce scores for arbitrary translations, and we propose a novel method to assess how well NMT systems model specific linguistic phenomena such as agreement over long distances, the production of novel words, and the faithful translation of polarity. The core idea is that we measure whether a reference translation is more probable under a NMT model than a contrastive translation which introduces a specific type of error. We present LingEval97, a large-scale data set of 97000 contrastive translation pairs based on the WMT English->German translation task, with errors automatically created with simple rules. We report results for a number of systems, and find that recently introduced character-level NMT systems perform better at transliteration than models with byte-pair encoding (BPE) segmentation, but perform more poorly at morphosyntactic agreement, and translating discontiguous units of meaning.
Anthology ID:
E17-2060
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short 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:
376–382
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-2060
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rico Sennrich. 2017. How Grammatical is Character-level Neural Machine Translation? Assessing MT Quality with Contrastive Translation Pairs. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers, pages 376–382, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How Grammatical is Character-level Neural Machine Translation? Assessing MT Quality with Contrastive Translation Pairs (Sennrich, EACL 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-2060.pdf
Code
 rsennrich/lingeval97