Exploring politeness control in NMT: fine-tuned vs. multi-register models in Castilian Spanish

Nowadays neural machine translation can generate high quality translations with regard to grammatical accuracy and fluency. Therefore, it is time to broaden research efforts to consider aspects of language that go beyond the mentioned attributes to keep pushing the limits of the technology. In this...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Soler Uguet, Celia, Aranberri Monasterio, Nora
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2023
País:España
Institución:Universidad del País Vasco
Repositorio:Addi. Archivo Digital para la Docencia y la Investigación
OAI Identifier:oai:addi.ehu.eus:10810/75936
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10810/75936
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:neural machine translation
politeness
fine-tuning models
multiregister models
Descripción
Sumario:Nowadays neural machine translation can generate high quality translations with regard to grammatical accuracy and fluency. Therefore, it is time to broaden research efforts to consider aspects of language that go beyond the mentioned attributes to keep pushing the limits of the technology. In this work, we focus on politeness. Specifically, we adapt and explore, for Castilian Spanish, two different domain-adaptation approaches: fine-tuning and multilingual models. Results from automatic and manual evaluations seem to indicate that the latter might be a better solution to strike a quality balance between all registers (formal, informal, and neutral). Fine-tuning a baseline system for each specific register seems to suffer from a degree of catastrophic forgetting, which leads to a worse overall performance of the engines.