Investigating Contextual Influence in Document-Level Translation

Current state-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT) architectures usually do not take document-level context into account. However, the document-level context of a source sentence to be translated could encode valuable information to guide the MT model to generate a better translation. In rece...

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Main Authors: Prashanth Nayak, Rejwanul Haque, John D. Kelleher, Andy Way
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2022-05-01
Series:Information
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/13/5/249
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author Prashanth Nayak
Rejwanul Haque
John D. Kelleher
Andy Way
author_facet Prashanth Nayak
Rejwanul Haque
John D. Kelleher
Andy Way
author_sort Prashanth Nayak
collection DOAJ
description Current state-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT) architectures usually do not take document-level context into account. However, the document-level context of a source sentence to be translated could encode valuable information to guide the MT model to generate a better translation. In recent times, MT researchers have turned their focus to this line of MT research. As an example, hierarchical attention network (HAN) models use document-level context for translation prediction. In this work, we studied translations produced by the HAN-based MT systems. We examined how contextual information improves translation in document-level NMT. More specifically, we investigated why context-aware models such as HAN perform better than vanilla baseline NMT systems that do not take context into account. We considered Hindi-to-English, Spanish-to-English and Chinese-to-English for our investigation. We experimented with the formation of conditional context (i.e., neighbouring sentences) of the source sentences to be translated in HAN to predict their target translations. Interestingly, we observed that the quality of the target translations of specific source sentences highly relates to the context in which the source sentences appear. Based on their sensitivity to context, we classify our test set sentences into three categories, i.e., <i>context-sensitive</i>, <i>context-insensitive</i> and <i>normal</i>. We believe that this categorization may change the way in which context is utilized in document-level translation.
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spelling doaj.art-c7c9cf1907734622b2d138724e8646262023-11-23T11:30:18ZengMDPI AGInformation2078-24892022-05-0113524910.3390/info13050249Investigating Contextual Influence in Document-Level TranslationPrashanth Nayak0Rejwanul Haque1John D. Kelleher2Andy Way3School of Computing, Dublin City University, D09 Y074 Dublin, IrelandSchool of Computing, National College of Ireland, D01 K6W2 Dublin, IrelandSchool of Computer Science, Technological University Dublin, D02 HW71 Dublin, IrelandSchool of Computing, Dublin City University, D09 Y074 Dublin, IrelandCurrent state-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT) architectures usually do not take document-level context into account. However, the document-level context of a source sentence to be translated could encode valuable information to guide the MT model to generate a better translation. In recent times, MT researchers have turned their focus to this line of MT research. As an example, hierarchical attention network (HAN) models use document-level context for translation prediction. In this work, we studied translations produced by the HAN-based MT systems. We examined how contextual information improves translation in document-level NMT. More specifically, we investigated why context-aware models such as HAN perform better than vanilla baseline NMT systems that do not take context into account. We considered Hindi-to-English, Spanish-to-English and Chinese-to-English for our investigation. We experimented with the formation of conditional context (i.e., neighbouring sentences) of the source sentences to be translated in HAN to predict their target translations. Interestingly, we observed that the quality of the target translations of specific source sentences highly relates to the context in which the source sentences appear. Based on their sensitivity to context, we classify our test set sentences into three categories, i.e., <i>context-sensitive</i>, <i>context-insensitive</i> and <i>normal</i>. We believe that this categorization may change the way in which context is utilized in document-level translation.https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/13/5/249machine translationneural machine translationcontext-aware translationdocument translation
spellingShingle Prashanth Nayak
Rejwanul Haque
John D. Kelleher
Andy Way
Investigating Contextual Influence in Document-Level Translation
Information
machine translation
neural machine translation
context-aware translation
document translation
title Investigating Contextual Influence in Document-Level Translation
title_full Investigating Contextual Influence in Document-Level Translation
title_fullStr Investigating Contextual Influence in Document-Level Translation
title_full_unstemmed Investigating Contextual Influence in Document-Level Translation
title_short Investigating Contextual Influence in Document-Level Translation
title_sort investigating contextual influence in document level translation
topic machine translation
neural machine translation
context-aware translation
document translation
url https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/13/5/249
work_keys_str_mv AT prashanthnayak investigatingcontextualinfluenceindocumentleveltranslation
AT rejwanulhaque investigatingcontextualinfluenceindocumentleveltranslation
AT johndkelleher investigatingcontextualinfluenceindocumentleveltranslation
AT andyway investigatingcontextualinfluenceindocumentleveltranslation