Translation Errors Significantly Impact Low-Resource Languages in Cross-Lingual Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Agrawal, Ashish Sunil, Fazili, Barah, Jyothi, Preethi
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Agrawal, Ashish Sunil
Fazili, Barah
Jyothi, Preethi
author_facet Agrawal, Ashish Sunil
Fazili, Barah
Jyothi, Preethi
contents Popular benchmarks (e.g., XNLI) used to evaluate cross-lingual language understanding consist of parallel versions of English evaluation sets in multiple target languages created with the help of professional translators. When creating such parallel data, it is critical to ensure high-quality translations for all target languages for an accurate characterization of cross-lingual transfer. In this work, we find that translation inconsistencies do exist and interestingly they disproportionally impact low-resource languages in XNLI. To identify such inconsistencies, we propose measuring the gap in performance between zero-shot evaluations on the human-translated and machine-translated target text across multiple target languages; relatively large gaps are indicative of translation errors. We also corroborate that translation errors exist for two target languages, namely Hindi and Urdu, by doing a manual reannotation of human-translated test instances in these two languages and finding poor agreement with the original English labels these instances were supposed to inherit.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_02080
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Translation Errors Significantly Impact Low-Resource Languages in Cross-Lingual Learning
Agrawal, Ashish Sunil
Fazili, Barah
Jyothi, Preethi
Computation and Language
Popular benchmarks (e.g., XNLI) used to evaluate cross-lingual language understanding consist of parallel versions of English evaluation sets in multiple target languages created with the help of professional translators. When creating such parallel data, it is critical to ensure high-quality translations for all target languages for an accurate characterization of cross-lingual transfer. In this work, we find that translation inconsistencies do exist and interestingly they disproportionally impact low-resource languages in XNLI. To identify such inconsistencies, we propose measuring the gap in performance between zero-shot evaluations on the human-translated and machine-translated target text across multiple target languages; relatively large gaps are indicative of translation errors. We also corroborate that translation errors exist for two target languages, namely Hindi and Urdu, by doing a manual reannotation of human-translated test instances in these two languages and finding poor agreement with the original English labels these instances were supposed to inherit.
title Translation Errors Significantly Impact Low-Resource Languages in Cross-Lingual Learning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02080