Document-level machine translation with word vector models

Abstract

In this paper we apply distributional semantic information to document-level machine translation. We train monolingual and bilingual word vector models on large corpora and we evaluate them first in a cross-lingual lexical substitution task and then on the final translation task. For translation, we incorporate the semantic information in a statistical document-level decoder (Docent), by enforcing translation choices that are semantically similar to the context. As expected, the bilingual word vector models are more appropriate for the purpose of translation. The final document-level translator incorporating the semantic model outperforms the basic Docent (without semantics) and also performs slightly over a standard sentence level SMT system in terms of ULC (the average of a set of standard automatic evaluation metrics for MT). Finally, we also present some manual analysis of the translations of some concrete documents