Abstract: Modern sentence-level NMT systems often produce plausible translations of isolated sentences. However, when put in context, these translations may end up being inconsistent with each other. We propose a monolingual DocRepair model to correct inconsistencies between sentence-level translations. DocRepair performs automatic post-editing on a sequence of sentence-level translations, refining translations of sentences in context of each other. For training, the DocRepair model requires only monolingual document-level data in the target language. It is trained as a monolingual sequence-to-sequence model that maps inconsistent groups of sentences into consistent ones. The consistent groups come from the original training data; the inconsistent groups are obtained by sampling round-trip translations for each isolated sentence. We show that this approach successfully imitates inconsistencies we aim to fix: using contrastive evaluation, we show large improvements in the translation of several contextual phenomena in an English-Russian translation task, as well as improvements in the BLEU score. We also conduct a human evaluation and show a strong preference of the annotators to corrected translations over the baseline ones. Moreover, we analyze which discourse phenomena are hard to capture using monolingual data only.

Introduction: Machine translation has made remarkable progress, and studies claiming it to reach a human parity are starting to appear BIBREF0. However, when evaluating translations of the whole documents rather than isolated sentences, human raters show a stronger preference for human over machine translation BIBREF1. These findings emphasize the need to shift towards context-aware machine translation both from modeling and evaluation perspective. Most previous work on context-aware NMT assumed that either all the bilingual data is available at the document level BIBREF2, BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF5, BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF10 or at least its fraction BIBREF11. But in practical scenarios, document-level parallel data is often scarce, which is one of the challenges when building a context-aware system. We introduce an approach to context-aware machine translation using only monolingual document-level data. In our setting, a separate monolingual sequence-to-sequence model (DocRepair) is used to correct sentence-level translations of adjacent sentences. The key idea is to use monolingual data to imitate typical inconsistencies between context-agnostic translations of isolated sentences. The DocRepair model is trained to map inconsistent groups of sentences into consistent ones. The consistent groups come from the original training data; the inconsistent groups are obtained by sampling round-trip translations for each isolated sentence. To validate the performance of our model, we use three kinds of evaluation: the BLEU score, contrastive evaluation of translation of several discourse phenomena BIBREF11, and human evaluation. We show strong improvements for all metrics. We analyze which discourse phenomena are hard to capture using monolingual data only. Using contrastive test sets for targeted evaluation of several contextual phenomena, we compare the performance of the models trained on round-trip translations and genuine document-level parallel data. Among the four phenomena in the test sets we use (deixis, lexical cohesion, VP ellipsis and ellipsis which affects NP inflection) we find VP ellipsis to be the hardest phenomenon to be captured using round-trip translations. Our key contributions are as follows: we introduce the first approach to context-aware machine translation using only monolingual document-level data; our approach shows substantial improvements in translation quality as measured by BLEU, targeted contrastive evaluation of several discourse phenomena and human evaluation; we show which discourse phenomena are hard to capture using monolingual data only.

Question: what phenomena do they mention is hard to capture?
Answer: Four discourse phenomena - deixis, lexical cohesion, VP ellipsis, and ellipsis which affects NP inflection.