Comparing and Analyzing Cohesive Devices of SMT and NMT from Chinese to English: A Diachronic Approach

Abstract

This work presents a detailed comparison and analysis of the usage of cohesive devices by three Machine Translation systems from Chinese to English, in both SMT and NMT situations. By both a general analysis of sentence length as well as cohesive devices and detailed analysis of a sentence translation in SMT and NMT with human translation as a reference, it is shown that, compared with SMT, NMT system is better at handling cohesive ties such as additive, adverbs and pronouns; however, both SMT and NMT underperform at dealing with demonstratives and lexical cohesion. This suggests an evidence of improved translation quality and the necessity of pre-editing and post-editing cohesive devices in MT translations.