English

Recovering document annotations for sentence-level bitext

Computation and Language 2024-06-07 v1

Abstract

Data availability limits the scope of any given task. In machine translation, historical models were incapable of handling longer contexts, so the lack of document-level datasets was less noticeable. Now, despite the emergence of long-sequence methods, we remain within a sentence-level paradigm and without data to adequately approach context-aware machine translation. Most large-scale datasets have been processed through a pipeline that discards document-level metadata. In this work, we reconstruct document-level information for three (ParaCrawl, News Commentary, and Europarl) large datasets in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese (paired with English). We then introduce a document-level filtering technique as an alternative to traditional bitext filtering. We present this filtering with analysis to show that this method prefers context-consistent translations rather than those that may have been sentence-level machine translated. Last we train models on these longer contexts and demonstrate improvement in document-level translation without degradation of sentence-level translation. We release our dataset, ParaDocs, and resulting models as a resource to the community.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.03869,
  title  = {Recovering document annotations for sentence-level bitext},
  author = {Rachel Wicks and Matt Post and Philipp Koehn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.03869},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

ACL 2024 Findings

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:55:32.567Z