Corpora for document-level neural machine translation

Siyou Liu, Xiaojun Zhang

Research output: Chapter in Book or Report/Conference proceedingConference Proceedingpeer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Instead of translating sentences in isolation, document-level machine translation aims to capture discourse dependencies across sentences by considering a document as a whole. In recent years, there have been more interests in modelling larger context for the state-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT). Although various document-level NMT models have shown significant improvements, there nonetheless exist three main problems: 1) compared with sentence-level translation tasks, the data for training robust document-level models are relatively low-resourced; 2) experiments in previous work are conducted on their own datasets which vary in size, domain and language; 3) proposed approaches are implemented on distinct NMT architectures such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and self-attention networks (SANs). In this paper, we aim to alleviate the low-resource and under-universality problems for document-level NMT. First, we collect a large number of existing document-level corpora, which covers 7 language pairs and 6 domains. In order to address resource sparsity, we construct a novel document parallel corpus in Chinese-Portuguese, which is a non-English-centred and low-resourced language pair. Besides, we implement and evaluate the commonly-cited document-level method on top of the advanced Transformer model with universal settings. Finally, we not only demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of document-level NMT, but also release the preprocessed data, source code and trained models for comparison and reproducibility.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLREC 2020 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Conference Proceedings
EditorsNicoletta Calzolari, Frederic Bechet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages3775-3781
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9791095546344
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Event12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2020 - Marseille, France
Duration: 11 May 202016 May 2020

Publication series

NameLREC 2020 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Conference Proceedings

Conference

Conference12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2020
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityMarseille
Period11/05/2016/05/20

Keywords

  • Corpus
  • Discourse
  • Document-Level Translation
  • Neural Machine Translation

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