Lost in Back-Translation: Emotion Preservation in Neural Machine Translation

Model and Implementation for Emotion Analysis and Transfer

Lost in Back-Translation: Emotion Preservation in Neural Machine Translation

Typ

ExperimentModels

Autor

Enrica Troiano, Roman Klinger, and Sebastian Padó.

Beschreibung

Machine translation provides powerful methods to convert text between languages, and is therefore a technology enabling a multilingual world. An important part of communication, however, takes place at the non-propositional level (e.g., politeness, formality, emotions), and it is far from clear whether current MT methods properly translate this information.

In our paper, we investigates the specific hypothesis that the non-propositional level of emotions is at least partially lost in MT. We carry out a number of experiments in a back-translation setup and establish that (1) emotions are indeed partially lost during translation; (2) this tendency can be reversed almost completely with a simple re-ranking approach informed by an emotion classifier, taking advantage of diversity in the n-best list; (3) the re-ranking approach can also be applied to change emotions, obtaining a model for emotion style transfer. An in-depth qualitative analysis reveals that there are recurring linguistic changes through which emotions are toned down or amplified, such as change of modality.

Referenz

Enrica Troiano, Roman Klinger, and Sebastian Padó. Lost in back-translation: Emotion preservation in neural machine translation. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2020.

A preprint is available at: http://www.romanklinger.de/publications/TroianoKlingerPado-coling2020.pdf

Download

Code repository: https://github.com/EnricaIMS/LostInBackTranslation

Download our emotion classifiers trained on ISEAR, BLOGS, TALES, TEC.

Dieses Bild zeigt Enrica Troiano

Enrica Troiano

 

Ehemalige Doktorandin

Dieses Bild zeigt Roman Klinger

Roman Klinger

Prof. Dr.

Außerplanmäßiger Professor

Dieses Bild zeigt Sebastian Padó

Sebastian Padó

Prof. Dr.

Lehrstuhlinhaber Theoretische Computerlinguistik, Geschäftführender Direktor des IMS

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