Automatic Detection of Translation Direction

Parallel corpora are crucial resources for NLP applications, most notably for machine translation. The direction of the (human) translation of parallel corpora has been shown to have significant implications for the quality of statistical machine translation systems that are trained with such corpora. We describe a method for determining the direction of the (manual) translation of parallel corpora at the sentence-pair level. Using several linguistically-motivated features, coupled with a neural network model, we obtain high accuracy on several language pairs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the accuracy is correlated with the (typological) distance between the two languages.