Evaluating Structural Generalization in Neural Machine Translation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kumon, Ryoma, Matsuoka, Daiki, Yanaka, Hitomi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913775721906176
author Kumon, Ryoma
Matsuoka, Daiki
Yanaka, Hitomi
author_facet Kumon, Ryoma
Matsuoka, Daiki
Yanaka, Hitomi
contents Compositional generalization refers to the ability to generalize to novel combinations of previously observed words and syntactic structures. Since it is regarded as a desired property of neural models, recent work has assessed compositional generalization in machine translation as well as semantic parsing. However, previous evaluations with machine translation have focused mostly on lexical generalization (i.e., generalization to unseen combinations of known words). Thus, it remains unclear to what extent models can translate sentences that require structural generalization (i.e., generalization to different sorts of syntactic structures). To address this question, we construct SGET, a machine translation dataset covering various types of compositional generalization with control of words and sentence structures. We evaluate neural machine translation models on SGET and show that they struggle more in structural generalization than in lexical generalization. We also find different performance trends in semantic parsing and machine translation, which indicates the importance of evaluations across various tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_13363
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Structural Generalization in Neural Machine Translation
Kumon, Ryoma
Matsuoka, Daiki
Yanaka, Hitomi
Computation and Language
Compositional generalization refers to the ability to generalize to novel combinations of previously observed words and syntactic structures. Since it is regarded as a desired property of neural models, recent work has assessed compositional generalization in machine translation as well as semantic parsing. However, previous evaluations with machine translation have focused mostly on lexical generalization (i.e., generalization to unseen combinations of known words). Thus, it remains unclear to what extent models can translate sentences that require structural generalization (i.e., generalization to different sorts of syntactic structures). To address this question, we construct SGET, a machine translation dataset covering various types of compositional generalization with control of words and sentence structures. We evaluate neural machine translation models on SGET and show that they struggle more in structural generalization than in lexical generalization. We also find different performance trends in semantic parsing and machine translation, which indicates the importance of evaluations across various tasks.
title Evaluating Structural Generalization in Neural Machine Translation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.13363