Task: Question Answering
Input (English): Comparing the natural and artificial sources of our parallel data wrt. several linguistic and distributional properties, we observe that (see Fig. FIGREF21 - FIGREF22 ):

artificial sources are on average shorter than natural ones: when using BT, cases where the source is shorter than the target are rarer; cases when they have the same length are more frequent.

automatic word alignments between artificial sources tend to be more monotonic than when using natural sources, as measured by the average Kendall INLINEFORM0 of source-target alignments BIBREF22 : for French-English the respective numbers are 0.048 (natural) and 0.018 (artificial); for German-English 0.068 and 0.053.  The intuition is that properties (i) and (ii) should help translation as compared to natural source, while property (iv) should be detrimental. 
 Question: what is their explanation for the effectiveness of back-translation?
Output (English): when using BT, cases where the source is shorter than the target are rarer; cases when they have the same length are more frequent automatic word alignments between artificial sources tend to be more monotonic than when using natural sources