Recent studies use a combination of lexical and syntactic features to show that footprints of the source language remain visible in translations, to the extent that it is possible to predict the original source language from the translation. In this paper, we focus on embedding-based semantic spaces, exploiting departures from isomorphism between spaces built from original target language and translations into this target language to predict relations between languages in an unsupervised way. We use different views of the data -words, parts of speech, semantic tags and synsets -to track translationese. Our analysis shows that (i) semantic distances between original target language and translations into this target language can be detected using the notion of isomorphism, (ii) language family ties with characteristics similar to linguistically motivated phylogenetic trees can be inferred from the distances and (iii) with delexicalised embeddings exhibiting source-language interference most significantly, other levels of abstraction display the same tendency, indicating the lexicalised results to be not "just" due to possible topic differences between original and translated texts. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time departures from isomorphism between embedding spaces are used to track translationese.
A description of a system for identifying Verbal Multi-Word Expressions (VMWEs) in running text is presented. The system mainly exploits universal syntactic dependency features through a Conditional Random Fields (CRF) sequence model. The system competed in the Closed Track at the PARSEME VMWE Shared Task 2017, ranking 2nd place in most languages on full VMWE-based evaluation and 1st in three languages on token-based evaluation. In addition, this paper presents an option to re-rank the 10 best CRF-predicted sequences via semantic vectors, boosting its scores above other systems in the competition. We also show that all systems in the competition would struggle to beat a simple lookup baseline system and argue for a more purposespecific evaluation scheme.
In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of training a multimodal neural machine translation (MNMT) system with image features for a lowresource language pair, Hindi and English, using synthetic data. A threeway parallel corpus which contains bilingual texts and corresponding images is required to train a MNMT system with image features. However, such a corpus is not available for low resource language pairs. To address this, we developed both a synthetic training dataset and a manually curated development/test dataset for Hindi based on an existing English-image parallel corpus. We used these datasets to build our image description translation system by adopting state-of-theart MNMT models. Our results show that it is possible to train a MNMT system for low-resource language pairs through the use of synthetic data and that such a system can benefit from image features.
Translationese is a phenomenon present in human translations, simultaneous interpreting, and even machine translations. Some translationese features tend to appear in simultaneous interpreting with higher frequency than in human text translation, but the reasons for this are unclear. This study analyzes translationese patterns in translation, interpreting, and machine translation outputs in order to explore possible reasons. In our analysis we (i) detail two non-invasive ways of detecting translationese and (ii) compare translationese across human and machine translations from text and speech. We find that machine translation shows traces of translationese, but does not reproduce the patterns found in human translation, offering support to the hypothesis that such patterns are due to the model (human vs. machine) rather than to the data (written vs. spoken).
Traditionalhand-crafted linguisticallyinformed features have often been used for distinguishing between translated and original non-translated texts. By contrast, to date, neural architectures without manual feature engineering have been less explored for this task. In this work, we (i) compare the traditional feature-engineering-based approach to the feature-learning-based one and (ii) analyse the neural architectures in order to investigate how well the hand-crafted features explain the variance in the neural models' predictions. We use pre-trained neural word embeddings, as well as several end-to-end neural architectures in both monolingual and multilingual settings and compare them to feature-engineering-based SVM classifiers. We show that (i) neural architectures outperform other approaches by more than 20 accuracy points, with the BERT-based model performing the best in both the monolingual and multilingual settings; (ii) while many individual hand-crafted translationese features correlate with neural model predictions, feature importance analysis shows that the most important features for neural and classical architectures differ; and (iii) our multilingual experiments provide empirical evidence for translationese universals across languages.
We report experiments with multi-modal neural machine translation models that incorporate global visual features in different parts of the encoder and decoder, and use the VGG19 network to extract features for all images. In our experiments, we explore both different strategies to include global image features and also how ensembling different models at inference time impact translations. Our submissions ranked 3rd best for translating from English into French, always improving considerably over an neural machine translation baseline across all language pair evaluated, e.g. an increase of 7.0-9.2 ME-TEOR points.
It is assumed that multimodal machine translation systems are better than text-only systems at translating phrases that have a direct correspondence in the image. This assumption has been challenged in experiments demonstrating that state-of-the-art multimodal systems perform equally well in the presence of randomly selected images, but, more recently, it has been shown that masking entities from the source language sentence during training can help to overcome this problem. In this paper, we conduct experiments with both visual and textual adversaries in order to understand the role of incorrect textual inputs to such systems. Our results show that when the source language sentence contains mistakes, multimodal translation systems do not leverage the additional visual signal to produce the correct translation. We also find that the degradation of translation performance caused by textual adversaries is significantly higher than by visual adversaries.
Cross-lingual natural language processing relies on translation, either by humans or machines, at different levels, from translating training data to translating test sets. However, compared to original texts in the same language, translations possess distinct qualities referred to as translationese. Previous research has shown that these translation artifacts influence the performance of a variety of crosslingual tasks. In this work, we propose a novel approach to reducing translationese by extending an established bias-removal technique. We use the Iterative Null-space Projection (INLP) algorithm, and show by measuring classification accuracy before and after debiasing, that translationese is reduced at both sentence and word level. We evaluate the utility of debiasing translationese on a natural language inference (NLI) task, and show that by reducing this bias, NLI accuracy improves. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to debias translationese as represented in latent embedding space.
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