Jessy Lin, G. Kovács, Aditya Shastry, Joern Wuebker, John DeNero
{"title":"Automatic Correction of Human Translations","authors":"Jessy Lin, G. Kovács, Aditya Shastry, Joern Wuebker, John DeNero","doi":"10.48550/arXiv.2206.08593","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"We introduce translation error correction (TEC), the task of automatically correcting human-generated translations.Imperfections in machine translations (MT) have long motivated systems for improving translations post-hoc with automatic post-editing.In contrast, little attention has been devoted to the problem of automatically correcting human translations, despite the intuition that humans make distinct errors that machines would be well-suited to assist with, from typos to inconsistencies in translation conventions.To investigate this, we build and release the Aced corpus with three TEC datasets (available at: github.com/lilt/tec). We show that human errors in TEC exhibit a more diverse range of errors and far fewer translation fluency errors than the MT errors in automatic post-editing datasets, suggesting the need for dedicated TEC models that are specialized to correct human errors. We show that pre-training instead on synthetic errors based on human errors improves TEC F-score by as much as 5.1 points. We conducted a human-in-the-loop user study with nine professional translation editors and found that the assistance of our TEC system led them to produce significantly higher quality revised translations.","PeriodicalId":382084,"journal":{"name":"North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"3","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.08593","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 3
Abstract
We introduce translation error correction (TEC), the task of automatically correcting human-generated translations.Imperfections in machine translations (MT) have long motivated systems for improving translations post-hoc with automatic post-editing.In contrast, little attention has been devoted to the problem of automatically correcting human translations, despite the intuition that humans make distinct errors that machines would be well-suited to assist with, from typos to inconsistencies in translation conventions.To investigate this, we build and release the Aced corpus with three TEC datasets (available at: github.com/lilt/tec). We show that human errors in TEC exhibit a more diverse range of errors and far fewer translation fluency errors than the MT errors in automatic post-editing datasets, suggesting the need for dedicated TEC models that are specialized to correct human errors. We show that pre-training instead on synthetic errors based on human errors improves TEC F-score by as much as 5.1 points. We conducted a human-in-the-loop user study with nine professional translation editors and found that the assistance of our TEC system led them to produce significantly higher quality revised translations.