Papers › When and Why is Document-level Context Useful in Neural Machine Translation?

When and Why is Document-level Context Useful in Neural Machine Translation?

1 Oct 2019WS 2019 11arXiv:1910.00294archive 2025-07-28

Yunsu Kim, Duc Thanh Tran, Hermann Ney

Document-level context has received lots of attention for compensating neural machine translation (NMT) of isolated sentences. However, recent advances in document-level NMT focus on sophisticated integration of the context, explaining its improvement with only a few selected examples or targeted test sets. We extensively quantify the causes of improvements by a document-level model in general test sets, clarifying the limit of the usefulness of document-level context in NMT. We show that most of the improvements are not interpretable as utilizing the context. We also show that a minimal encoding is sufficient for the context modeling and very long context is not helpful for NMT.

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