Pronoun-Focused MT and Cross-Lingual Pronoun Prediction: Findings of the 2015 DiscoMT Shared Task on Pronoun Translation

Abstract

We describe the design, the evaluation setup, and the results of the DiscoMT 2015 shared task, which included two subtasks, relevant to both the machine translation (MT) and the discourse communities: (i) pronoun-focused translation, a practical MT task, and (ii) cross-lingual pronoun prediction, a classification task that requires no specific MT expertise and is interesting as a machine learning task in its own right. We focused on the English-French language pair, for which MT output is generally of high quality, but has visible issues with pronoun translation due to differences in the pronoun systems of the two languages. Six groups participated in the pronoun-focused translation task and eight groups in the cross-lingual pronoun prediction task.

Rule-Based Pronominal Anaphora Treatment for Machine Translation

“…When measuring only the translations of pronouns, however, the AR component shows a positive effect when compared to a baseline without it, as shown in Table 2. Since these results are computed using exact word-level alignment matching between the candidate translation and an unique reference (Hardmeier et al, 2015), they are only indicative. Table 2: Contrastive results obtained from the test set.…”

“…This is the case Moreover, even in cases where a pronoun is translated as a pronoun, the mapping is not one-toone. To illustrate this, we composed a sample of 25,000 it and they taken from the Workshop data (instances from the Europarl, TED and News Commentary files are included) (Hardmeier et al, 2015). The translation distribution of these two pronouns is presented in Table 1 and Figure 1.…”

Co-reference Resolution of Elided Subjects and Possessive Pronouns in Spanish-English Statistical Machine Translation

“…Hardmeier et al (2015) and Guillou et al (2016). Le Nagard and Koehn (2010) do not treat null subjects, since they work on the language pair English-French, but instead aim to improve the translation of it and they.…”

It-disambiguation and source-aware language models for cross-lingual pronoun prediction

“…As revealed in an analysis of the systems submitted to the DiscoMT 2015 shared task on pronoun translation (Hardmeier et al, 2015a), the translation of pleonastic and event reference pronouns poses a particular problem for MT systems . Poor performance may be attributed to the inability of the systems to disambiguate the various possible functions of the pronoun "it".…”