{"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/machine-translation-of-novels-in-the-age-of","title":"Machine Translation of Novels in the Age of Transformer","arxiv_id":"2011.14979","date":"2020-11-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Antonio Toral","Antoni Oliver","Pau Ribas Ballestín"],"abstract":"In this chapter we build a machine translation (MT) system tailored to the literary domain, specifically to novels, based on the state-of-the-art architecture in neural MT (NMT), the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017), for the translation direction English-to-Catalan. Subsequently, we assess to what extent such a system can be useful by evaluating its translations, by comparing this MT system against three other systems (two domain-specific systems under the recurrent and phrase-based paradigms and a popular generic on-line system) on three evaluations. The first evaluation is automatic and uses the most-widely used automatic evaluation metric, BLEU. The two remaining evaluations are manual and they assess, respectively, preference and amount of post-editing required to make the translation error-free. As expected, the domain-specific Transformer-based system outperformed the three other systems in all the three evaluations conducted, in all cases by a large margin.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.14979v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.14979v1.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":"machine-translation-of-novels-in-the-age-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/antot/mt_lit_transformer","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"nmt","task_name":"NMT"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2011.14979","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2011.14979","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}