Automatically extracting challenge sets for non-local phenomena in neural machine translation

Abstract

We show that the state-of-the-art Transformer MT model is not biased towards monotonic reordering (unlike previous recurrent neural network models), but that nevertheless, longdistance dependencies remain a challenge for the model. Since most dependencies are short-distance, common evaluation metrics will be little influenced by how well systems perform on them. We therefore propose an automatic approach for extracting challenge sets replete with long-distance dependencies, and argue that evaluation using this methodology provides a complementary perspective on system performance. To support our claim, we compile challenge sets for English-German and German-English, which are much larger than any previously released challenge set for MT. The extracted sets are large enough to allow reliable automatic evaluation, which makes the proposed approach a scalable and practical solution for evaluating MT performance on the long-tail of syntactic phenomena1.