NMTScore: A Multilingual Analysis of Translation-based Text Similarity Measures

Jannis Vamvas, Rico Sennrich


Abstract
Being able to rank the similarity of short text segments is an interesting bonus feature of neural machine translation. Translation-based similarity measures include direct and pivot translation probability, as well as translation cross-likelihood, which has not been studied so far. We analyze these measures in the common framework of multilingual NMT, releasing the NMTScore library. Compared to baselines such as sentence embeddings, translation-based measures prove competitive in paraphrase identification and are more robust against adversarial or multilingual input, especially if proper normalization is applied. When used for reference-based evaluation of data-to-text generation in 2 tasks and 17 languages, translation-based measures show a relatively high correlation to human judgments.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.15
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
198–213
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.15
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.15
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jannis Vamvas and Rico Sennrich. 2022. NMTScore: A Multilingual Analysis of Translation-based Text Similarity Measures. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 198–213, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NMTScore: A Multilingual Analysis of Translation-based Text Similarity Measures (Vamvas & Sennrich, Findings 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.15.pdf
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