Vanmassenhove, Eva ORCID: 0000-0003-1162-820X, Hardmeier, Christian and Way, Andy ORCID: 0000-0001-5736-5930 (2018) Getting gender right in neural machine translation. In: 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP2018), 30 Oct- 4 Nov 2018, Brussels, Belgium.
Abstract
Speakers of different languages must attend
to and encode strikingly different aspects of
the world in order to use their language correctly (Sapir, 1921; Slobin, 1996). One such
difference is related to the way gender is expressed in a language. Saying “I am happy”
in English, does not encode any additional
knowledge of the speaker that uttered the sentence. However, many other languages do
have grammatical gender systems and so such
knowledge would be encoded. In order to
correctly translate such a sentence into, say,
French, the inherent gender information needs
to be retained/recovered. The same sentence
would become either “Je suis heureux”, for a
male speaker or “Je suis heureuse” for a female one. Apart from morphological agreement, demographic factors (gender, age, etc.)
also influence our use of language in terms of
word choices or even on the level of syntactic constructions (Tannen, 1991; Pennebaker
et al., 2003). We integrate gender information
into NMT systems. Our contribution is twofold: (1) the compilation of large datasets with
speaker information for 20 language pairs, and
(2) a simple set of experiments that incorporate gender information into NMT for multiple language pairs. Our experiments show that
adding a gender feature to an NMT system significantly improves the translation quality for
some language pairs.
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 Institutes and Centres > ADAPT |
Published in: | Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. . Association for Computational Linguistics. |
Publisher: | Association for Computational Linguistics |
Official URL: | http://dx.doi.org/10.18653/v1/D18-1334 |
Copyright Information: | © 2018 Association for Computational Linguistics |
Use License: | This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. View License |
Funders: | COST action IS1312, the Dublin City University Faculty of Engineering & Computing under the Daniel O’Hare Research Scholarship scheme, ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology, which is funded under the SFI Research Centres Programme (Grant 13/RC/2106)., Swedish Research Council under grant 2017-930 |
ID Code: | 23345 |
Deposited On: | 22 May 2019 14:02 by Thomas Murtagh . Last Modified 06 Jul 2020 14:14 |
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