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

Jiao Liu

doi:10.4236/ojml.2020.106046

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.

Highlights

Machine Translation (MT) can be regarded as the pearl on the crown of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as people’s first practice of automatic translation from one natural language to another exists even earlier than the invention of digital computer
We had conducted a detailed comparison of cohesive ties between Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT) for Chinese to English language pair
Our findings are: 1) NMT system is better at handling a) additive devices to make English sentence a cohesive one, b) adverbs, c) and pronouns compared with SMT, suggesting an evidence of improved translation quality

Summary

Introduction

Machine Translation (MT) can be regarded as the pearl on the crown of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as people’s first practice of automatic translation from one natural language to another exists even earlier than the invention of digital computer. In this paper, we try a different way and carry out a case study on a text from academic genre by diachronically identifying and comparing cohesive devices of the text, translated by human and three MT systems, i.e. Google Translate, Baidu Translate, and Bing Translator, in 2016 and 2020, relying on SMT and NMT respectively. The significance of comparing cohesive devices of Chinese to English translations by different MT systems based on both SMT and NMT approaches outweighs, benefiting the development of SMT and NMT systems as well as MT evaluation

Related Works

Cohesive Devices

Data Collection and Research Methods

Findings

Overall Usage of Cohesive Devices

Summary and Outlook