did they collect their own contrastive test set?
It is automatically created from the OpenSubtitles corpus.
The translation of pronouns presents a special challenge to machine translation to this day, since it often requires context outside the current sentence. Recent work on models that have access to information across sentence boundaries has seen only moderate improvements in terms of automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU. However, metrics that quantify the overall translation quality are ill-equipped to measure gains from additional context. We argue that a different kind of evaluation is needed to assess how well models translate inter-sentential phenomena such as pronouns. This paper therefore presents a test suite of contrastive translations focused specifically on the translation of pronouns. Furthermore, we perform experiments with several context-aware models. We show that, while gains in BLEU are moderate for those systems, they outperform baselines by a large margin in terms of accuracy on our contrastive test set. Our experiments also show the effectiveness of parameter tying for multi-encoder architectures.
Even though machine translation has improved considerably with the advent of neural machine translation (NMT) BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , the translation of pronouns remains a major issue. They are notoriously hard to translate since they often require context outside the current sentence. As an example, consider the sentences in Figure FIGREF1 . In both languages, there is a pronoun in the second sentence that refers to the European Central Bank. When the second sentence is translated from English to German, the translation of the pronoun it is ambiguous. This ambiguity can only be resolved with context awareness: if a translation system has access to the previous English sentence, the previous German translation, or both, it can determine the antecedent the pronoun refers to. In this German sentence, the antecedent Europäische Zentralbank dictates the feminine gender of the pronoun sie. It is unfortunate, then, that current NMT systems generally operate on the sentence level BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 . Documents are translated sentence-by-sentence for practical reasons, such as line-based processing in a pipeline and reduced computational complexity. Furthermore, improvements of larger-context models over baselines in terms of document-level metrics such as BLEU or RIBES have been moderate, so that their computational overhead does not seem justified, and so that it is hard to develop more effective context-aware architectures and empirically validate them. To address this issue, we present an alternative way of evaluating larger-context models on a test set that allows to specifically measure a model's capability to correctly translate pronouns. The test suite consists of pairs of source and target sentences, in combination with contrastive translation variants (for evaluation by model scoring) and additional linguistic and contextual information (for further analysis). The resource is freely available. Additionally, we evaluate several context-aware models that have recently been proposed in the literature on this test set, and extend existing models with parameter tying. The main contributions of our paper are: Section SECREF2 explains how our paper relates to existing work on context-aware models and the evaluation of pronoun translation. Section SECREF3 describes our test suite. The context-aware models we use in our experiments are detailed in Section SECREF4 . We discuss our experiments in Section SECREF5 and the results in Section SECREF6 .