Case-Sensitive Neural Machine Translation

Abstract

Even as an important lexical information for Latin languages, word case is often ignored in machine translation. According to observations, the translation performance drops significantly when we introduce case-sensitive evaluation metrics. In this paper, we introduce two types of case-sensitive neural machine translation (NMT) approaches to alleviate the above problems: i) adding case tokens into the decoding sequence, and ii) adopting case prediction to the conventional NMT. Our proposed approaches incorporate case information to the NMT decoder by jointly learning target word generation and word case prediction. We compare our approaches with multiple kinds of baselines including NMT with naive case-restoration methods and analyze the impacts of various setups on our approaches. Experimental results on three typical translation tasks (Zh-En, En-Fr, En-De) show that our proposed methods lead to the improvements up to 2.5, 1.0 and 0.5 in case-sensitive BLEU scores respectively. Further analyses also illustrate the inherent reasons why our approaches lead to different improvements on different translation tasks.