Examining the Tip of the Iceberg: A Data Set for Idiom Translation

Marzieh Fadaee; Arianna Bisazza; Christof Monz

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arXiv · 1802.04681

Examining the Tip of the Iceberg: A Data Set for Idiom Translation

Marzieh Fadaee·Arianna Bisazza·Christof Monz

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Abstract

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been widely used in recent years with significant improvements for many language pairs. Although state-of-the-art NMT systems are generating progressively better translations, idiom translation remains one of the open challenges in this field. Idioms, a category of multiword expressions, are an interesting language phenomenon where the overall meaning of the expression cannot be composed from the meanings of its parts. A first important challenge is the lack of dedicated data sets for learning and evaluating idiom translation. In this paper we address this problem by creating the first large-scale data set for idiom translation. Our data set is automatically extracted from a widely used German-English translation corpus and includes, for each language direction, a targeted evaluation set where all sentences contain idioms and a regular training corpus where sentences including idioms are marked. We release this data set and use it to perform preliminary NMT experiments as the first step towards better idiom translation.

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Marzieh Fadaee, Arianna Bisazza, Christof Monz. 2018-02-13. Examining the Tip of the Iceberg: A Data Set for Idiom Translation. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04681

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