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Does the Future Need
Translators?
Marcello Federico, FBK, Italy
Dublin, 6-7 June 2016
TAUS Industry Leaders Forum 2016
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Very competitive research area
Steady performance improvements
Recent paradigm shift: from SMT to NMT
Strong adoption by translation industry
Strong adoption by global players
This naturally creates great expectations … and worries!
Progress in Machine Translation
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Best MT Performance over Time @ IWSLT
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
2012 2013 2014 2015
DELTA
% EN-DE
DE-EN
RU-EN
EN-ZH
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MT is a very very hard problem
and still only partially explored
Difficulty of tasks is unpredictable
we don’t know how far we are from the solution
Neural MT has improved performance
on a few languages only (so far)
State-of-the-art still bad when translating
into morphologically rich languages
between distant language pairs
Still not enough language resources available
But
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Best Measured MT Performance @ IWSLT
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
EN-PL
EN-DE
TR-EN
DE-EN
EN-SL
ZH-EN
EN-ZH
PL-EN
AR-EN
EN-TR
FA-EN
EN-AR
RU-EN
EN-FR
RO-EN
EN-ES
ES-EN
NL-EN
EN-PT
PT-EN
Delta
BLEU
Baseline Best Delta
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Examples from best WMT 2016 systems
Directio
n
MT Reference Output
TR-EN Syste
mCom
binatio
n ??
He said Lamb made the
fateful 911 call sometime
after that.
Lamb's paints 911 call, and
shortly after, he said.
CZ-EN NMT He said Lamb made the
fateful 911 call sometime
after that.
Lamb said he made a fatal phone
call to the emergency line shortly
afterwards.
RU-EN NMT+
PBMT
He said Lamb made the
fateful 911 call sometime
after that.
He reported that he made the
truthful call to 911 shortly after the
Lamb.
FI-EN PBMT He said Lamb made the
fateful 911 call sometime
after that.
He said Lamb called the dramatic
911 call for some time after that.
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Translators will leverage MT more and more
get rid of routine and boring translations
MT will learn from translators
error repairs, style, terminology, …
Post-editing effort (PE) for technical translation:
< 5% PE for popular pairs EN->FR,ES,PT,IT,AR,…
< 10% PE for harder pairs EN -> RU,DE,FN,TR,ZH,JP
< 15% PE for well resources non-English
E.g. UN and EU language pairs
My optimistic 5-year predictions
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Best MT Performance over Time
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
2012 2013 2014 2015
DELTA
%
EN-FR
AR-EN
ZH-EN
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Skype Translator Task
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Boring Translations
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Creative Translations
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Difficult Translation