The TALP-UPC System for the WMT Similar Language Task: Statistical vs Neural Machine Translation

Magdalena Biesialska, Lluis Guardia, Marta R. Costa-jussà


Abstract
Although the problem of similar language translation has been an area of research interest for many years, yet it is still far from being solved. In this paper, we study the performance of two popular approaches: statistical and neural. We conclude that both methods yield similar results; however, the performance varies depending on the language pair. While the statistical approach outperforms the neural one by a difference of 6 BLEU points for the Spanish-Portuguese language pair, the proposed neural model surpasses the statistical one by a difference of 2 BLEU points for Czech-Polish. In the former case, the language similarity (based on perplexity) is much higher than in the latter case. Additionally, we report negative results for the system combination with back-translation. Our TALP-UPC system submission won 1st place for Czech->Polish and 2nd place for Spanish->Portuguese in the official evaluation of the 1st WMT Similar Language Translation task.
Anthology ID:
W19-5424
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 3: Shared Task Papers, Day 2)
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Ondřej Bojar, Rajen Chatterjee, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Yvette Graham, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, André Martins, Christof Monz, Matteo Negri, Aurélie Névéol, Mariana Neves, Matt Post, Marco Turchi, Karin Verspoor
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
185–191
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-5424
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-5424
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Magdalena Biesialska, Lluis Guardia, and Marta R. Costa-jussà. 2019. The TALP-UPC System for the WMT Similar Language Task: Statistical vs Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 3: Shared Task Papers, Day 2), pages 185–191, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The TALP-UPC System for the WMT Similar Language Task: Statistical vs Neural Machine Translation (Biesialska et al., WMT 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-5424.pdf