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Are ambiguous conjunctions problematic for machine translation?

Popović, Maja orcid logoORCID: 0000-0001-8234-8745 and Castilho, Sheila orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-8416-6555 (2019) Are ambiguous conjunctions problematic for machine translation? In: Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2019), 2 - 4 Sept 2019, Varna, Bulgaria.

Abstract
The translation of ambiguous words still poses challenges for machine translation. In this work, we carry out a systematic quantitative analysis regarding the ability of different machine translation systems to disambiguate the source language conjunctions “but” and “and”. We evaluate specialised test sets focused on the translation of these two conjunctions. The test sets contain source languages that do not distinguish different variants of the given conjunction, whereas the target languages do. In total, we evaluate the conjunction “but” on 20 translation outputs, and the conjunction “and” on 10. All machine translation systems almost perfectly recognise one variant of the target conjunction, especially for the source conjunction “but”. The other target variant, however, represents a challenge for machine translation systems, with accuracy varying from 50% to 95% for “but” and from 20% to 57% for “and”. The major error for all systems is replacing the correct target variant with the opposite one.
Metadata
Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Event Type:Conference
Refereed:Yes
Subjects:Computer Science > Machine translating
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Research Initiatives and Centres > ADAPT
Published in: Mitkov, Ruslan and Angelova, Galia, (eds.) Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2019). . INCOMA Ltd..
Publisher:INCOMA Ltd.
Official URL:http://dx.doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-056-4_111
Copyright Information:© 2019 The Authors
Funders:Science Foundation Ireland Research Centres Programme (Grant 13/RC/2106), European Regional Development Fund
ID Code:24476
Deposited On:25 May 2020 15:46 by Maja Popovic . Last Modified 20 Jan 2021 16:49
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