Translationese as a Language in “Multilingual” NMT

Parker Riley, Isaac Caswell, Markus Freitag, David Grangier


Abstract
Machine translation has an undesirable propensity to produce “translationese” artifacts, which can lead to higher BLEU scores while being liked less by human raters. Motivated by this, we model translationese and original (i.e. natural) text as separate languages in a multilingual model, and pose the question: can we perform zero-shot translation between original source text and original target text? There is no data with original source and original target, so we train a sentence-level classifier to distinguish translationese from original target text, and use this classifier to tag the training data for an NMT model. Using this technique we bias the model to produce more natural outputs at test time, yielding gains in human evaluation scores on both accuracy and fluency. Additionally, we demonstrate that it is possible to bias the model to produce translationese and game the BLEU score, increasing it while decreasing human-rated quality. We analyze these outputs using metrics measuring the degree of translationese, and present an analysis of the volatility of heuristic-based train-data tagging.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.691
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7737–7746
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.691
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.691
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Parker Riley, Isaac Caswell, Markus Freitag, and David Grangier. 2020. Translationese as a Language in “Multilingual” NMT. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 7737–7746, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Translationese as a Language in “Multilingual” NMT (Riley et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.691.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928765