Handling Homographs in Neural Machine Translation

Frederick Liu, Han Lu, Graham Neubig


Abstract
Homographs, words with different meanings but the same surface form, have long caused difficulty for machine translation systems, as it is difficult to select the correct translation based on the context. However, with the advent of neural machine translation (NMT) systems, which can theoretically take into account global sentential context, one may hypothesize that this problem has been alleviated. In this paper, we first provide empirical evidence that existing NMT systems in fact still have significant problems in properly translating ambiguous words. We then proceed to describe methods, inspired by the word sense disambiguation literature, that model the context of the input word with context-aware word embeddings that help to differentiate the word sense before feeding it into the encoder. Experiments on three language pairs demonstrate that such models improve the performance of NMT systems both in terms of BLEU score and in the accuracy of translating homographs.
Anthology ID:
N18-1121
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1336–1345
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1121
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1121
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Frederick Liu, Han Lu, and Graham Neubig. 2018. Handling Homographs in Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 1336–1345, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Handling Homographs in Neural Machine Translation (Liu et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1121.pdf