On the Evaluation of Machine Translation for Terminology Consistency

As neural machine translation (NMT) systems become an important part of professional translator pipelines, a growing body of work focuses on combining NMT with terminologies. In many scenarios and particularly in cases of domain adaptation, one expects the MT output to adhere to the constraints provided by a terminology. In this work, we propose metrics to measure the consistency of MT output with regards to a domain terminology. We perform studies on the COVID-19 domain over 5 languages, also performing terminology-targeted human evaluation. We open-source the code for computing all proposed metrics.1

[1]  Yaser Al-Onaizan,et al.  Training Neural Machine Translation to Apply Terminology Constraints , 2019, ACL.

[2]  Vassilina Nikoulina,et al.  A Multilingual Neural Machine Translation Model for Biomedical Data , 2020, NLP4COVID@EMNLP.

[3]  André F. T. Martins,et al.  Marian: Fast Neural Machine Translation in C++ , 2018, ACL.

[4]  Graham Neubig,et al.  TICO-19: the Translation Initiative for Covid-19 , 2020, NLP4COVID@EMNLP.

[5]  Christopher D. Manning,et al.  Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages , 2020, ACL.

[6]  C. Laymon A. study , 2018, Predication and Ontology.

[7]  Toms Bergmanis,et al.  Facilitating Terminology Translation with Target Lemma Annotations , 2021, EACL.

[8]  Jörg Tiedemann,et al.  OPUS-MT – Building open translation services for the World , 2020, EAMT.

[9]  Qun Liu,et al.  Lexically Constrained Decoding for Sequence Generation Using Grid Beam Search , 2017, ACL.

[10]  Karin M. Verspoor,et al.  Findings of the 2016 Conference on Machine Translation , 2016, WMT.

[11]  Salim Roukos,et al.  Bleu: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation , 2002, ACL.

[12]  Jörg Tiedemann,et al.  Parallel Data, Tools and Interfaces in OPUS , 2012, LREC.

[13]  Daniel Marcu,et al.  Statistical Phrase-Based Translation , 2003, NAACL.

[14]  Matt Post,et al.  Fast Lexically Constrained Decoding with Dynamic Beam Allocation for Neural Machine Translation , 2018, NAACL.

[15]  Myle Ott,et al.  Facebook FAIR’s WMT19 News Translation Task Submission , 2019, WMT.

[16]  Myle Ott,et al.  Scaling Neural Machine Translation , 2018, WMT.