{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/crossing-the-threshold-idiomatic-machine","title":"Crossing the Threshold: Idiomatic Machine Translation through Retrieval Augmentation and Loss Weighting","arxiv_id":"2310.07081","date":"2023-10-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Emmy Liu","Aditi Chaudhary","Graham Neubig"],"abstract":"Idioms are common in everyday language, but often pose a challenge to translators because their meanings do not follow from the meanings of their parts. Despite significant advances, machine translation systems still struggle to translate idiomatic expressions. We provide a simple characterization of idiomatic translation and related issues. This allows us to conduct a synthetic experiment revealing a tipping point at which transformer-based machine translation models correctly default to idiomatic translations. To expand multilingual resources, we compile a dataset of ~4k natural sentences containing idiomatic expressions in French, Finnish, and Japanese. To improve translation of natural idioms, we introduce two straightforward yet effective techniques: the strategic upweighting of training loss on potentially idiomatic sentences, and using retrieval-augmented models. This not only improves the accuracy of a strong pretrained MT model on idiomatic sentences by up to 13% in absolute accuracy, but also holds potential benefits for non-idiomatic sentences.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07081v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.07081v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"crossing-the-threshold-idiomatic-machine","repo_url":"https://github.com/nightingal3/idiom-translation","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"4k","task_name":"4k"},{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2310.07081","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}