The Box is in the Pen: Evaluating Commonsense Reasoning in Neural Machine Translation

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Hauptverfasser: He, Jie, Wang, Tao, Xiong, Deyi, Liu, Qun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author He, Jie
Wang, Tao
Xiong, Deyi
Liu, Qun
author_facet He, Jie
Wang, Tao
Xiong, Deyi
Liu, Qun
contents Does neural machine translation yield translations that are congenial with common sense? In this paper, we present a test suite to evaluate the commonsense reasoning capability of neural machine translation. The test suite consists of three test sets, covering lexical and contextless/contextual syntactic ambiguity that requires commonsense knowledge to resolve. We manually create 1,200 triples, each of which contain a source sentence and two contrastive translations, involving 7 different common sense types. Language models pretrained on large-scale corpora, such as BERT, GPT-2, achieve a commonsense reasoning accuracy of lower than 72% on target translations of this test suite. We conduct extensive experiments on the test suite to evaluate commonsense reasoning in neural machine translation and investigate factors that have impact on this capability. Our experiments and analyses demonstrate that neural machine translation performs poorly on commonsense reasoning of the three ambiguity types in terms of both reasoning accuracy (60.1%) and reasoning consistency (31%). The built commonsense test suite is available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/CommonMT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_03308
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Box is in the Pen: Evaluating Commonsense Reasoning in Neural Machine Translation
He, Jie
Wang, Tao
Xiong, Deyi
Liu, Qun
Computation and Language
Does neural machine translation yield translations that are congenial with common sense? In this paper, we present a test suite to evaluate the commonsense reasoning capability of neural machine translation. The test suite consists of three test sets, covering lexical and contextless/contextual syntactic ambiguity that requires commonsense knowledge to resolve. We manually create 1,200 triples, each of which contain a source sentence and two contrastive translations, involving 7 different common sense types. Language models pretrained on large-scale corpora, such as BERT, GPT-2, achieve a commonsense reasoning accuracy of lower than 72% on target translations of this test suite. We conduct extensive experiments on the test suite to evaluate commonsense reasoning in neural machine translation and investigate factors that have impact on this capability. Our experiments and analyses demonstrate that neural machine translation performs poorly on commonsense reasoning of the three ambiguity types in terms of both reasoning accuracy (60.1%) and reasoning consistency (31%). The built commonsense test suite is available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/CommonMT.
title The Box is in the Pen: Evaluating Commonsense Reasoning in Neural Machine Translation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03308