Pronoun Translation in English-French Machine Translation: An Analysis of Error Types
Pronouns are a long-standing challenge in machine translation. We present a study of the performance of a range of rule-based, statistical and neural MT systems on pronoun translation based on an extensive manual evaluation using the PROTEST test suite, which enables a fine-grained analysis of diffe...
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Main Authors | , |
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Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
30.08.2018
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Pronouns are a long-standing challenge in machine translation. We present a
study of the performance of a range of rule-based, statistical and neural MT
systems on pronoun translation based on an extensive manual evaluation using
the PROTEST test suite, which enables a fine-grained analysis of different
pronoun types and sheds light on the difficulties of the task. We find that the
rule-based approaches in our corpus perform poorly as a result of
oversimplification, whereas SMT and early NMT systems exhibit significant
shortcomings due to a lack of awareness of the functional and referential
properties of pronouns. A recent Transformer-based NMT system with
cross-sentence context shows very promising results on non-anaphoric pronouns
and intra-sentential anaphora, but there is still considerable room for
improvement in examples with cross-sentence dependencies. |
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DOI: | 10.48550/arxiv.1808.10196 |